Bits of broken pottery (a then paper equivalent) bore the names of those who were not welcome in the Athenian society at the time, and the unfortunate champion who had his named scratched on the clay fragments (a then ink substitute) would be forced into exile. An ostracized person could return after the passage of 10 years though, but he was forbidden to do so earlier under pain of death.
But what in the world does it have to do with our contemporary existence? Well, it serves to demonstrate that some phenomena (be that people or ideas) we take for granted and view as indispensible parts of our day-to-day life may one day be proclaimed unwanted and deleted from our midst. Do you reckon it an unlikely scenario? Or could this fate have befallen quite a range of things?
One of the piercing revelations I received while doing a translation course was the way Soviet translators treated the texts they worked with. That is the texts containing Biblical quotations. Those, on a par with mentions of God, were persistently and rigorously left out of original pages. Apparently, translators had been instructed to act like that because God and the Bible were anything but needed in the USSR. Thus ostracized.
Even to the most untrained eye it is clear that the level of etiquette and customer service in the former Soviet Union parts leave much to be desired. Foreign guest can’t help noticing this huge void when visiting our terrain, Russian (and Ukrainian) speaking people stubbornly demonstrate this crying lack while roaming across the globe. But why are the notions of politeness and customer service so alien to our mentality?!
Yesterday, while working on a customer service article (not on this one), I happened to tarry on the Wikipedia Customer service entry to look through the list of sources. As I was scrolling down the article, I suddenly froze, horror-stricken. Helplessly, I was staring in disbelief at the list of the languages on the left, into which the Customer service article had been created. There was no Russian there. There was no Ukrainian…
According to the law of supply and demand books (and articles alike) are written and translated into the languages which have an audience to appeal to, which have an ear to address. Obviously, the customer service message would fall on a deaf ear in Ukraine, being part of the vast expanse of the former Soviet Union. Isn’t it heartbreaking? Even if notions of human dignity in general and customer service in particular were ostracized in the USSR and erased from our mind, it’s time we, Ukrainians, woke up to the fact we desperately need customer service back!
