The maintenance to provide above-and-beyond service

Your barista does the labor to not throw a drink in your face

The art of juggling and regulating emotional labor

There’s an art to handling myself so my emotions do not dictate my behavior. It’s performative labor, allowing another person to rattle off on their soapbox even though I’m just doing a business transaction. Let’s keep it professional.

At my last job, I had a phone call from a prospective client - he asked about mortgage rates.

Instead of mortgage rates, though, a diarrhea of unsolicited thoughts and opinions flowed out of his pie hole. He was fluent in the current events that any talking head had fear-mongered on cable TV. He was attuned to the civil unrest in New York City that was fueled by the murder of George Floyd.

He wanted his opinion known

This is when I lived in Brooklyn, 2020. In the headlines, protestors reacted to the murder of George Floyd by vandalizing storefronts. And even though 4th of July fireworks being set off in the streets are the norm, the noise complaints were tremendous.¹ There were peaceful demonstrations, too. However, the prospective client on the phone was overtly concerned about the “divisiveness of the country.”

I stopped the conversation short. From my memory it went along the lines of:

Him: I just want to know, what on earth is happening up in New York? I'm calling from Florida. It’s shameful. This is a great country. We should be thankful how much freedom we have. G-d gave us this country to be free. The administration is struggling to put thugs and looters in their—

Me: Thanks for sharing.

Making so many decisions throughout the day depletes your willpower.² If you work in an emotionally-taxing environment, odds are it drains you even more.

If I had to make phone calls, send emails, choose what clients to field for more sales opportunities, and follow-up with management and higher-ups through an eight-hour workday, then, yes, my brain will be fried.

Physical labor and emotional labor

There’s physical labor and there’s emotional labor at work. I give credit to anyone working in a role that uses your physical body. The body needs to rest for restoration and repair.

The emotional labor to be in a customer-facing role from my last job resulted in burnout. It was a lot. There's an art to regulating your own emotions. The effect of my social interactions throughout the work day can result me being in a mood that’s either,

1. Pleasant and energetic.

2. Garbage and a sprinkling of horse turd.

It’s a dance. A dance I was determined to lead. Don’t step on my toes and don’t drag your own feet.

Am I saying be a people pleaser? Do I advocate doing favors for your customers? No, and no, unless you are 100% at fault for a mistake resulting in mediocre service. It’s why boundaries are so important in front-facing jobs.

The maintenance of it all

Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ most important and radical contribution to contemporary art is “maintenance art”; the stance that care work is art because it involves creative; challenging; emotional work, just like the craft of making art. Making ceramics, paintings, illustrations, and other fine art is akin to maintaining the clean up of public and private spaces.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance, 1979-1980.

Ukeles is a performance artist. She’s known in contemporary art for her residency with the New York City Department of Sanitation.³ Ukeles’ work conveys the grit and labor sanitation workers invest in keeping NYC clean.

There’s a performance piece where Ukeles washes and scrubs a museum. Her intention is to bring attention to the custodians who preserve the beautification of the museum. It involves thankless labor, normally invisible to a museum patron. The labor is highlighted front and center; museum patrons witnessed the physical labor Ukeles subjected herself to.

Ukeles, Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside, 1973

By centering the physical work out in plain view, you can’t ignore the labor a custodian does to invest in keeping the museum squeaky clean. 

Emotional labor is thankless

I share this reflection knowing the holidays can be a grueling time for some people. If your job relies on you to interact with customers, then maybe your patience can be tested. If you anticipate contentious talks during a holiday meal, then you’re doing more work to regulate your emotions. Even if you get time off as a customer-facing worker, it’s ancillary labor to keep your emotions in check around loved ones.

Most conversations can pivot in your control by uttering, “thanks for sharing”.

My other fave phrases are,

• That’s a unique perspective I now know.

• Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

• It’s good to know you’re passionate about this topic.

And if you need to bring a conversation at your job back on the rails,

This is a place of business, so let’s make this talk productive.

A hug for any customer service worker

The winter holidays can be a pressure cooker for any customer-facing employee; they do the work of delivering exceptional service.

Please, don’t be a dick.

Give additional care and patience for the retail workers and the food industry workers. They juggle; they do a balancing act of managing their emotions plus servicing their customers. The labor they do to make it look so effortless is invisible.

Unless, you know the dance if you’re a frontline worker, too.

👀

• Nov. 27, 2021 is Small Business Saturday. You should support your local small business. You should also read this essay that dives into the small history of the celebratory successes behind small businesses. Why do they hold an iconic status in the United States? What defines a small business? And OMG why do small business owners gotta tell me they own a small business? A quote from Benjamin C. Waterhouse’s critical essay,

Although love for small business may seem like a timeless feature of capitalism, the widespread belief that small entrepreneurs hold the keys to economic revival is relatively recent...To make things more complicated, ‘small business’ covers a diverse range of business functions, counting everyone from the small-town dry cleaner to the wealthy software start-up. We know small business the way US Supreme Court Justice Potter Steward knew pornography: when we see it.

• Time Management Won’t Save You by Dane Jensen. You can stop complaining that there’s never enough time to do anything. Just stop. Think less on decisions and instead let rules or principles structure your day.

• Mierle Laderman Ukeles with Maya Harakawa. I will pull this quote,

...I became a maintenance worker because I became [a] mother. The thing about maintenance is that if you decide that something has value, then you want to maintain it. You have to do a series of tasks to keep it alive. I loved that baby; I fell madly in love with that baby. But I didn’t know anything about being a mother, about how to make sure that my child was healthy and robust. Whether it’s a child, an institution, or a city, it’s all the same: if you want them to thrive, you have to do a lot of maintenance—a whole lot.

My fiancé, Eve, is an amazing editor. Everyone please thank her for sharing! 💖

Thanks for listening,

Alexander

1. CBS New York, “Over 1,200 Complaints About Illegal Fireworks Reported Across NYC In Just 14 Days.”

2. Nemeth MD, “News: The Information Overload of the COVID-19 Zeitgeist.”

3. Kennedy, “An Artist Who Calls the Sanitation Department Home.”