Today on No Bekah is an Island / Other Humans are Real, I’m thinking about Customer Service. I in fact was a ‘Customer Service Specialist’ for nearly three years, which I promise was not secretly prostitution. I always took the angle of LESS IS MORE. People like to be heard, and understood, but ultimately, they want to get the crap off the phone and on with their days. Sometimes we feel like entering the social contract in which we are the customer in need of being serviced – and are happy to engage in small talk with the Servicing human, and happy to hear about special offers / new price rates / the other person’s entire life story / etc. And then other times, WE ARE NOT. Take my super chatty and possibly autistic cab driver who drove a very cracked-out Me home from LAX last night, who needed to recite to me everything he likes to eat at Norm’s restaurant, in alphabetical order. Or, the Enterprise rental agent whom I just picked my car up from, who needed to ask me 11 times why I was in town, needed to know where I was from, and absolutely needed to tell me about his unfinished screenplay. Out of respect for the service-r, do we engage in said small talk, or is it rude, is it so terribly rude, TO JUST WANT THE GET THE CAR, GIVE ME THE KEYS TO THE CAR, NOW IS WHEN I WOULD LIKE TO LEAVE, AND I DO NOT MUCH CARE THAT YOU LIVED IN PATTERSON NEW JERSEY FOR THREE MONTHS EIGHT YEARS AGO.