Clients and Customers

The lazy man takes another man's ideas and uses them as his own. This is not necessarily unintelligent, and it may be economically rational. But sometimes it is hilarious. I was most amused to see a school principal saying in the national press, "...we are able to use the processes and system to meet the needs of our students, we nowadays refer to as clients or customers."

Quite apart from the awkward phrasing, this is a common idea. Schools provide a service called education, students receive that service. Therefore, students are clients or customers.

But I'd like to suggest that there is something not quite right about that idea. Let us, for example, consider prisons. Prisons provide a service called incarceration (and also, lodgings, food and sometimes education of all kinds) which keep their residents out of trouble. Convicted criminals receive that service. Therefore criminals are clients or customers.

The truth must lie somewhere in there. The problem is that the whole business idea is full of related platitudes such as, "The customer is always right." It's also a common idea that if your services are good, you will get repeat customers. And if you provide inadequate service, your customers should be allowed to sue for compensation.

Schools are a totally different kind of business though. The customer is being provided a service that is designed to show that he is wrong, because if he is always right, he wouldn't need the service. The customer is to be discouraged from repeating the experience, no matter how much he wants to. And if the school provides inadequate service, the example of happy customers will be used to show that the student is a bad one and the school owes him nothing in compensation.

As some of my former students pointed out, not every business gets to incarcerate its clients, dictate their mode of behaviour, and beat them if it feels necessary. The closest you get to this is a rather kinky kind of establishment.

And yet, schools are good things. They are institutional pillars of modern society. One wonders how these contradictions arise, and if anything ought to be done about them.

Day 003

Today is the third day. By the end of today, my last twelve years will have been crated up and distributed out. It is a sobering thing, to realise that all you have done and all that you own can be packaged in about 40 cubic metres of space, most of it filled with paper and emptiness.

It is like watching a play: five acts, maybe twenty scenes. Then it is over as the lights come up across the theatre. Yet, there will have been highs and lows, comedy and tragedy, fantasy and farce, serious issues and intangible ones. Love, war, power, destiny, hate, rivalry, ambition, kindness and generosity, the will to survive, the desire for peace — all these things can be revealed to us in a play.

For those of you who study business and management, who think about balance sheets and inputs and outputs, I have some advice. In life, as in business, assets should be put to work early and made to produce a return on investment. If assets held produce too little return on investment, and the overheads and downside are too great, then it is time to diversify or to divest. But all that is head knowledge. Sometimes, it has to be applied.

By tonight, I shall have filled in the boxes. By tomorrow, I will rejoin the community of believers as a penitent, for tomorrow is Good Friday. It will be time to remember the transition that is death — and also to begin to hope for all the life to come.

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Update at 5 pm: All my books are packed now. There are so many empty shelves. I have a box that contains nothing but the things my students have written about me. I spent a few hours looking through these for bad things. To those of you who felt my sarcasm, anger, or intolerance — I apologise to you for not being a better man. It is Holy Thursday now. Happy birthday to my Dutch god-daughter. Oddly enough, it's just a few days after my first god-daughter's birthday, she who is now in San Francisco.

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Update at 10 pm: I just threw out about 8 kg of materials pertaining to the past. It's amazing how much documentation exists, testifying to what I spent my youth on, signed by venerable authorities; it just amazes me. The past is truly another country, one whose borders I shall no longer transgress. Sometimes, I shall gaze forlorn across the barbed wire. It is like the experience of 20th century emigré Russians. It is still in my blood. You can take the boy out of Russia, but not Russia out of the boy.