“It was such good service”

Over Christmas, I visited family friends on their doorstep.
One of the couples I visited discussed their recent experience procuring their Christmas meal. It involved, in short, them changing their order at incredibly short notice, and it appears that the staff at the shop were very accommodating and forgiving.
The family friend recounting this story said “it was, really, such good service. Great service!”.

It made me bristle. And I wondered why.

I think it’s because the statement made, was an assessment of the service they received. In making any assessment of the service they received, they signify that they perceive their receipt of service as legitimate. They should receive service, someone should be served and someone should serve.

I bristled because I have had service jobs before, and I know how hard they are, and I know how shit people can be, and how much you are underpaid for those roles. Crucially, after so much time in a service profession, anyone learns that there is no difference between someone who is serving and someone who is served. Nothing justifies that distinction between two different people. You learn only that the people who you are serving think your servitude is legitimate. To them, you deserve servitude, not equality.

When I bristled, it was class division coming through. He finds servitude legitimate. I have served, I do not find it legitimate. It was my relationship to money, concept of the future and a whole host of bodily habits, mannerisms and assumptions about the world fighting forward to the front momentarily. It was hexis and the habitus (in Bourdieu’s terminology) finding a literal physical form.

Class is not dead, do not believe anybody who tells you it is.