Loving Others as God Loves Us
by: Jon Crane

Vol. 2, No. 21 (October 23, 1999)

A few weeks ago, a woman pulled into a McDonald's drive-in near where I live. She placed her order then drove around to the pick-up window. Upon examining her fries she complained to the young woman in the window that they were stale.

The employee started to reach for the fries to replace them when the customer threw the bag through the window at her. Not to be outdone, the employee picked up two Cokes sitting in front of her and threw them into the car at the offending patron. Drenched with Coca-Cola, the woman in the car whipped out a pistol and pointed it at the server. The incident ended with the McDonald's employee quickly ducking below the counter. The woman in the car sped off and was never caught, to my knowledge.

And what was all this over? An order of French fries. Super size your order for only 39¢ and you can escalate your happy meal to a murder meal.

I'm not sure which is the greater crime in this situation: the woman who pulled the gun or the woman who retaliated to an obnoxious customer with an even more obnoxious act. Is civility, decency and courtesy really dead? Is this example of customer service and customer behavior an extreme or a foreshadowing of the norm as we approach a new millennium? Don't like your service? Shoot the server.

Respect, simple human respect, seems to be a vanishing aspect in modern society. Symptomatic (but less dramatic than the French fry episode) examples abound. Movie theaters now put a slide on the screen before the feature begins asking people not to talk or use cell phones during the movie. (I once sat in front of a young couple who, during the course of the movie, planned their entire wedding. When I'd finally had enough and turned around to ask them to be quiet, they looked at me as if I'd just arrived from another planet. It had never occurred to them that what they were doing was out of line.)

My company, a major leader in its field worldwide, has embarked on an aggressive training program, training people in basic telephone skills. It's a program as complicated and radical as teaching the concepts of "please" and "thank you." And it's not just the entry-level customer service personnel in training. It includes executives and management as well.

Is it the duty of business and schools to teach the aspects of common courtesy and respect? Didn't those things used to be taught within the family? Didn't churches and schools used to reinforce what we learned at home? Rhetorical questions, all … I know.

All God asks of us is to love each other as He loves us. God loves the most heinous sinner; God loves even those of us who not only do not love Him back but openly scorn Him. It's a simple concept as old as man's belief in God. It is the basic guiding principle of human respect. We should not dwell on the question that asks "where did we lose it?" We need to busy ourselves with the question, "How do we get it back?"

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