In a call center you get to chat with a cross-section of humanity. With phrases like "entitlement mentality," "you're not owed anything" and "personal responsibility" being slung around these days, I find it interesting that the biggest whiners with the greatest sense of entitlement are unfailingly upper-class white people.

My calls are mostly from around the Southeast. The "I'm entitled because I'm better than you" mindset is firmly entrenched in ghettos like West Palm Beach, Florida (bitchiest women in the world. It's politically incorrect to propose violence against women but many of those ladies could use a good smack, of reality if nothing else), Franklin, Tennesse (Nashville area) and Alpharetta/Buckhead, Georgia. They want a $200 phone for free, they want huge credits for negligible, fleeting inconveniences, they want unlimited service for $10 a month, etc. In contrast the lower-class people around Mississippi and Alabama are usually pretty easy to work with and take their fee lumps like adults.

It's quite funny to hear some guy in South Carolina who you just know is a Bush supporter, with his voice audibly bouncing off his oak floors and French windows, saying, "Why didn't anybody tell me I was going over my minutes?" We provide a free service to check your own minutes, buddy. When you have tens of millions of customers we can't babysit you. How about some o' that personal responsibility, motherfucker?!

So it was quite funny to chat with what sounded like another upper-middle-class white male the other day. This guy had gone way over his minutes to the tune of $100+ dollars and, like about 100% of our customers, felt it was Fitzsimmons Wireless' fault. He went on a, no kidding, five minute monologue about how we were price-gouging and Fitzsimmons could expect to see a big exodus of customers if we continued charging like this. He planned to check prices with Verizon.

I told him I had just gotten Verizon's site up on my screen and they had the exact same packages at the exact same prices, and their early termination and overage policies were identical, also. So where was he going again? Tat for tat with no tit inbetween, as my mom used to say.

"That's probably the result of industry-wide price fixing," he countered, "and the government should probably look into it."

This was a scream. Since this guy sounded about 38, definitely white, likely college-educated with an interest in current events and politics, I had him pegged as one of those who have followed the fad of claiming to be a Libertarian. Government should stay out of the affairs of private business! The free market will decide! And here he was calling for a government investigation into the cell phone business.

I threw reverence for company policy about discussing politics aside and said, "I just have to ask, how would you define yourself politically?" He said he was conservative on some issues and liberal on others, but he didn't believe either the Left or the Right had all the answers. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm going to believe this meant he was a Libertarian but realized what a hypocritical moron he would sound like calling for a federal investigation into wireless service prices while proclaiming everywhere else that the free market was in control.

I often do this when customers call complaining about this or that. "Ma'am, I'm sorry, but the situation you're describing just couldn't be happening. Our economic system is based on offering the highest-quality products and services at the lowest possible price, so there's no way your phone has died in just 10 months after dropping calls constantly. A company couldn't be this huge and have a high stock value if it operated like that.

"NAH...I'm kidding! Are you near a trash can? Throw that phone in there! It's cooked!"

It just amazes me that people serve up endless kvetching about how shoddy the service and products are from this company and that, then swear up and down that our public utilities should be turned over entirely to these same private businesses with no government regulation whatsoever. DUUURRRRR...

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