Service
There is a major difference between knowing something and understanding it. Knowing something means that specific bit of knowledge is embedded in your brain, a hopefully permanent item in one of the drawers of your mental filing cabinets, whereas understanding goes merely archiving it for future retrieval: implies dissecting it, analyzing it, and finally interiorizing the true nature of the item. It is closer to what Valentine Michael Smith would define as grokking.
This is something I’ve always known and often understood, but it is still amazing how well after my 30th birthday – and damn near close to my 31st – I still find myself surprised when I suddenly understand something and, through the process of understanding it, I realize that I merely knew it before.
More often than not these epiphanies have to do with myself. Truth be told, I know myself pretty well. I am brutally honest about my shortcomings and almost never humble about my virtues. I also use the same microscope for looking at myself that I use for other people, but when pointed at myself it tends to reveal a lot more detail – after all, I have both a lot more information and a better established context when dealing with my own person.
It came as a surprise, then, when yesterday I realized how much I enjoy being served.
I partly knew this before. While I despise a servile attitude, I delight in having people around me to take care of the tasks that I’m not good at, dislike, or just consider an annoyance and a distraction from what I really want to do.
Take for instance Harold, the bike messenger I use for running some errands. Harold is capable, punctual and bill for some errands less than I would have to pay for a 1-way cab, without even taking into account the cost of the time I would spend.
There’s also Doña Flor, a lady who shows up twice a week to my apartment to help me with the cleaning and the laundry (bull shit, she doesn’t help me, she does it all herself). She’s extremely efficient, is honest and has a great attitude: Bast respects her, Horus adores her and she doesn’t grovel and treat me like some sort of feudal lord, an approach I would hate. She is somebody I trust enough that she has the keys to my apartment and just lets herself in and out as will. Doña Flor has also half-become a sort of assistant, somebody I can rely on to filter the people that would bother me at ungodly hours of the morning (that means before noon).
Take last Friday, for instance. Vero stayed over at the apartment on Thursday, so I didn’t go to sleep until well after 4am. Some people from ATT were supposed to show up that very Friday morning to perform some maintenance on the electric gates, and I just knew they would appear when I was far off frolicking in the dream lands. I half-woke up some time after 8, the time at which doña Flor usually gets there, so I went downstairs for a moment and gave her my wallet, asked her to please take care of the ATT folks and if the house was on fire, leave me a note on the table and I’d read it when I finally woke up.
Which didn’t happen until after noon, when doña Flor had already left. On the dining room table I did find a note (fortunately, it wasn’t about the house being on fire) which had three items.
- Despite many previous phone calls confirming their visit, the
ATT folks had not actually shown up. - Anna’s Studio, the salon where I cut my hair, had called to
confirm an appointment for 11am. Doña Flor re-scheduled it for
the next week. - Guiselle from the office had called, said it was urgent, asked
that I please return the call ASAP.
If you paid attention you’ll notice that not only she re-scheduled my appointment rather than waking me up against my instructions, which could perfectly have been interpreted as a jest, but that somebody purporting to be from my place of work had called on what she claimed was an urgent matter and had been brushed off.
Esteban can say all he wants about doña Flor realizing that it is I who pays her salary and not Guiselle, but the fact remains that you just can’t pay enough for service like that.
That sort of thing happens enough that I just can’t do without doña Flor, but it seems that I just hadn’t actually understood how much pleasure I derive from situations where I’m able to just hire somebody for a task that they can execute much better than I could myself.
But this past Wednesday sitting at the salon, peaceful music playing on the background while a woman unwrapped my arms from some spa treatment and massaged them, all in parallel with Anna’s massaging my scalp after the haircut, I reached a Nirvana and finally understood how much service pleases me.
(Too Patrick Bateman-ish?)