Pardon Me While I Have a Strange Interlude

pervocracy:

Everyone knows that on Uber/Lyft you should always give the driver five stars unless they, like, drive the car into the ocean or something, right?  You can’t say “the ride was fine, nothing special, so I gave them three stars,” because the company will punish them for being anything less than perfect.

Well, you should know that the same rule goes for any kind of customer service survey.  Unless the service you received was unacceptable, give them 5/5 or 10/10 or whatever.  It’s annoying, because it ruins the sensitivity of the survey, but it’s how it’s gotta be.  9/10 gets treated like a problem and 6/10 gets treated like a disaster.   Understand this and do the workers a favor by grading easy.

The worst way to respond to this is to say “that’s terribly unfair, and I refuse to prop up this terribly unfair system by giving in to it.” It’s a more self-righteous, faux-leftist (or actual leftist) version of the second worst way to respond, which is to say “if their system is applied in a fucked-up way, that’s not my problem.”

There’s a clear parallel with monetary tips here.