Bring Me To Your Leader

Issue 211

New York, 2023

---

Traveling across town at short notice on a recent night, I took what turned out to be a rather miserable car service. Neither the driver’s preference for mumbles nor his unfilled dreams of Formula 1 triumph brought me much joy. Although I sat in the back, he sat right next to me, the recline of his seat sufficient enough for a dentist to have done some touchup while we sped across the city. A bit of a perilous ride, perhaps, but not too much of a bother, as I watched the blur of city lights outside my window, the reflection of street lamps and traffic signals and head lights that flashed in every storefront, my mind filled with stray thoughts of Robert De Niro’s character in Taxi Driver.

When I eventually stepped out of the car, my legs adjusting to reentry into normal gravity, the tires screaming right as I closed the door, my phone asked if I wanted to rate my driver. It is a peculiar and unexpected feature of our contemporary world—this endless judging and rating and assessing. I can’t order dinner or buy new clothes or even get my haircut without being asked to lead a management meeting about customer service. Money isn’t a sufficient standard anymore: nearly everybody I meet comes with a slobbering impatience for my verdict. What do you think? How did I do? Could I have been better? Businesses have adopted the mentality of the most insecure teenagers, forever looking at themselves in the mirror, forever asking whether something is wrong, forever worrying that you’ll never come back, forever demanding that you tell them what you’re thinking. For this particular rating, on this particular night, while standing in a puddle on a dark street, I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to do.

---

I’m pretty sure that I’ve never left a bad rating, especially a rating that’s delivered to an employer about an employee. That isn’t the same as never having bad service, or never needing to solve a problem caused by an employee. But in nearly all of those situations I’ve talked to the person responsible rather than strained my neck to climb a corporate hierarchy—I’ve told drivers when there was a problem, just as I’ve told employees in stores or waiters in restaurants, with the obvious implication that this method results in various levels of success. On the rare occasion when I’ve needed an actual supervisor, alas, my immediate and sole concern is to fix the problem. Your flight ticket was canceled because is a sentence that doesn’t need an ending. Once I hear the fifth word, I’m concentrating on what happens next, not listening to fanciful tales of past incompetence. And I’m particularly unenthused by supervisors who want me to deliver surreptitious annual reviews.

Asking to see the manager is rightly heard as crass and slimy and obnoxious. The sound of those words comes with a twang, a certain pompousness, even vulgarity, there’s a lowbrow quality to hearing them in a crowded store, spit from the mouth of an irate customer. You can picture the smirk. The contempt. The icy, self-satisfied glare. And you can picture the sort of person who relishes these moments—the loathsome person who relishes the shiver that comes from speaking this incantation. Which doesn’t mean that a reach for a higher authority isn’t ever the right choice. There are times when it is absolutely necessary, when the person in front of you is making it all very much worse, when you’ll take pretty much any mammal with a heartbeat that’s available as a replacement. But I am picturing the cases when an authority is called without justification, which looks, to me, a tad totalitarian. These are the cases where a powerless person is given just a little bit of power—the power to tell, to report, to criticize, to judge, to convict.

---

My preference, I admit, is harder, and comes with drawbacks. It isn’t always possible, though it is certainly an ideal that I wouldn’t want to dismiss. And it is, at least, what I try first, as my desire is to support a world that incentivizes a human conversation rather than the creation of an electronic record for a file. More selfishly, my sense is that I lose a little bit of what makes me human by avoiding the most difficult conversations. If there’s actually a problem that needs to be solved, the conversation will eventually occur, whether I force someone else to do it or whether I do it myself. Even though I don’t often use the word shame, that’s what I would feel if I force someone else to undertake my difficult conversations.

The words—I’d like to see the manager—spoken as a cry, offer, instead, the sensation of a coming savior. A chance to speak to the real authority. To plead the case. To end all the nonsense. There must be someone who knows what to do! Where is the person who cuts corners and finds solutions and just handles the issue, making the bump on our knee all better? As an incantation, I’d like to speak to the manager has become the national motto. It’s omnipresent, as both fear and desire. The fear that someone will speak to your manager. The desire that you’ll speak to theirs. Where is the person who will finally make the phone call, sign the paper, and give authorization?

Seeking this real leader, it is curious to note, has made much of the world anxious in recent years. Regardless of your political affiliation, or even your location, you must have noticed that nearly every major political movement both accuses its opponents of authoritarianism and is also accused of authoritarianism by its opponents. The charge, rightly seen as dreadful, can’t be escaped. It is our fear, the regurgitated topic in our news. The watchmen and vigilantes must not take control, says the amateur censors, the creators of blacklists. The politics of authoritarianism must be stopped, says the person who wants to speak to the manager, the boss, the supervisor. The totalitarian impulse of control and spying must be resisted, says the person who secretly rates every restaurant waiter and customer service call with meticulous detail. The potential dictators must be halted before they’re given power, says the hall monitors, the safety patrols, the neighborhood watch. Get out your flashlights, start taking notes, turn on your cell phones, make sure you’re recording.