Against my better judgment, like a stranded wayfarer forced to seek shelter in a ruined Transylvanian castle, I stagger into a plenary and meet 'n' greet in the fourth-floor conference room, where I'm ushered to the table by a delegate from HR in the role of creepily silent butler welcoming me to his mysterious master's house of horror, then seated amongst other, equally bewildered guests.
As we twitch nervously, staring uneasily at the bullet-pointed documents placed in front of us, disembodied voices begin crackling forth from the corner of the room: it's a corporate video featuring gleaming-toothed, unctuous actors getting overly excited about "awesome" customer service. Apparently, we all must learn to grovel before our clients like especially obsequious Devil worshippers celebrating Satan's arrival during a particularly depraved black mass.
Our attention is then directed back to the bullet-pointed documents: on a scale from zero to five, how do we rate our own interactions with customers based on the video we just watched, zero being not very positively and five being very positively? I don't recall a horror story in which victims are reduced to infantile behavior, but this morning's activities would surely provide excellent material for such a book.
