The Unseen Here and Now . . .
Stuart
Revercomb
Stuart
Revercomb is a marketing consultant and joyously married father of four
children. He seems to remember someone once telling him he ought to be
a writer. "The Unseen Here and Now" -- Thursdays.
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August 30, 2001
The
Scourge of Mediocrity
Although I haven't seen it in years I can still recall the expression
on Wolfgang Mozart's face in the movie Amadeus as he asks his nemesis
Antonio Salieri who's music the Emperor has selected to be featured in
the royal court :
MOZART
Whom did they choose?
SALIERI
Herr Sommer.
MOZART
Sommer? Herr Sommer? But the man's a fool! He's a total MEDIOCRITY !!.
SALIERI
No, no, no: he has yet to achieve mediocrity...
If Wolfgang Amadeus had a hard time with the "mediocrity" of fellow composers and 18th Century Vienna aristocracy, imagine what his musings might be among 21st Century Americans. Americans have perfected mediocrity, honing it to a "science" in pursuit of the almighty buck and "the way of least resistance."
And what is worse, we have come to accept it.
We all have our "mediocre moments" when, owing to fatigue or boredom or distraction or a combination of all three, we produce results that don't necessarily reflect the best we have to offer. There are also times when we are still in the learning process - when our best beginner efforts fail to rise above the level of what others can only best describe as mediocre.
But we are generally forgiven for these less than stellar performances. It's the day in and day out brand of what Websters defines as "medium, average, fairish, indifferent, intermediate, moderate or so-so" efforts, that tend to drive others crazy.
"All I asked for was a couple of extra ketchup packets in the bag... it seemed like a simple enough request..."
"Mr. Revercomb, we did receive your order, and we know we promised you that it would be delivered in 2 weeks, but some of our sales people have been out lately and we had a special conference last week and we had some rush orders that came in yesterday and we..."
"We're delaying this flight sir and combining it with the one in 3 hours because we don't have enough passengers booked - if you'll just have a seat and..."
"MEDIOCRITY!!" It's everywhere. And sometimes you can't help but support it.
A restaurant that is convenient to our neighborhood has cornered the market on the bane of Messieurs Mozart and Salieri. It serves up a perfect balance of "medium, average, fairish, indifferent, intermediate, moderate and so-so", meals with such routine that it has achieved a sort of "excellence in mediocrity".
The servings are of marginal size, but not so small that you can really complain, and the general quality of everything from the salad to the service is, well - just good enough to keep you from remembering in a day or two that you probably shouldn't come back.
Which, of course, we invariably do. It's just too darn easy and convenient not to. It makes you wish they would just go on and cross the line and serve you that one wretched meal so that you could make the firm decision to never return. But they don't. It's a whole lot easier being mediocre than just plain bad.
When your product or service is bad, you have to deal with the consequences, but if you can give it just enough extra effort to "achieve mediocrity" you probably won't disappoint the "average customer." But not all customers are average, and if you're not, sometimes it pays to express your disappointment.
As children we learn this early. Nothing motivated me more in the long term than the disappointment of my parents. Don't get me wrong, the good old fashioned spanking and later the "grounding to home" was never welcome and often led to the quick recovery of one's proper attitude. But the weight of parental disappointment bore down like stone upon our guilty souls, until correction that had more permanent roots found fertile ground in our hearts.
It was O.K. to be average - one's own wits or lack thereof in any given area might lead to a case where reaching "average" was doing well indeed. (Algebra comes to mind). But endeavors in which we achieved something less than what we were capable, were met with the greatest measures of disappointment.
Mediocre we would not be - even if we didn't know the meaning of the word.
But a great many people in the world today seem to know it all too well.
The next time you experience a service or product or attitude that is below the level of fair expectation, and you are asked for your opinion, do everyone a favor and advise them gently and courteously that, "if mediocrity is their goal they have resoundingly achieved it."
The great composer himself will surely be smiling upon
you.