Customers generally complain when their order is fucked up. It happened again just now, here at the local chain café down the street from my house. From what I overheard, there were two muffins in the lady's wax bag instead of the three she paid for. It was a simple error, it was taken care of, but not without an unpleasant confrontation.
The girl behind the counter got my breakfast right, she always
does: hot medium regular and a blueberry muffin. As always, she
processed the order on autopilot, closing things by putting the change
on the far edge of the counter. That's okay, I
take the transaction about as personally as she does. But from the
whispers I occasionally hear on the way out, there are some who are
somehow offended. It's as if they're owed a smile or something.It's an everyday American glimpse into what our race has been trying to achieve ever since we lost our tails: perfectly efficient servants who happily accept their roles with endless docility, who enjoy their tasks as much as their taskmasters enjoy assigning them. This is all much more difficult to pull off than it might sound: colonized peoples generally take up arms and rebel, robots have an unsatisfying lack of humanity about them, and hiring help never bought anyone a steadfast soul. The slow-unwinding history of the industrial and technological revolutions can be easily recast as the ongoing quest for happy slaves.
The failures, though valiant, have brought humanity much confusion and despair. I tell you this today: nothing is ever going to be solved until we figure out this happy-slave problem. The clock is ticking. World peace, limitless prosperity, a brighter and more delicious tomorrow hang in the balance.
