Психологический эффект «пациентности»: как удобство сервисов формирует чувство права на чужое время

Yesterday, after a treatment at a dermatologist’s clinic I have been visiting regularly for the past few months, one of the technicians said something that stayed with me. She is usually quiet and reserved, but yesterday she was unusually talkative. She told me that she liked having me as a client. Over the months, she had noticed that I asked how her day was, what she had done on a holiday, and whether she was doing all right. She had noticed that I did not become angry when I had to wait, did not raise my voice when a procedure took longer than expected, and generally asked the staff what needed to be done rather than telling them how they should do it. I have heard similar things from a stylist at my salon, from technicians I have hired through Urban Company, from electricians and air-conditioner technicians, and sometimes from delivery workers who come to my door. The compliment is usually some version of the same thing: I am patient, I speak to them respectfully, and I make the interaction easier than they expected. It was the word ‘patient’ that caught me. I have never really associated it with myself. Neither, I suspect, have the people closest to me. I can be restless about my own life, impatient with my own uncertainties and eager to understand my own behaviour before I have given myself enough time to sit with it. So why did this particular compliment stay with me? Why did being called patient by someone who knows me almost entirely through a series of appointments make me think about my own character? Perhaps because there is something strangely revealing about being seen by people who have no reason to like us. We usually look for evidence of our character in relationships that matter to us. We ask whether we are good friends, loving partners, responsible children or decent colleagues. Those relationships contain affection, history and reciprocity. We care about how the other person sees us because that person has a place in our lives. There are consequences to being careless with them. A service provider occupies a different place in our lives. The relationship may last twenty minutes, an hour, or only long enough for a parcel to change hands. We may never see the person again. We know almost nothing about their life, and they know almost nothing about ours. Yet these brief encounters carry a peculiar imbalance: we are the ones asking for something, and they are the ones expected to provide it. That arrangement is perfectly ordinary. What is less ordinary is what it can do to our behaviour. Being a customer can create a particular kind of entitlement. We have paid, so we feel entitled to the service. That part is reasonable. But the feeling can quietly grow beyond the transaction. We begin to feel entitled to someone’s time, their attention, their flexibility and sometimes even their submission to our mood. The distinction matters. We are entitled to good service. We are not entitled to make the person providing it feel worthless. This is where everyday interactions become more revealing than they first appear. A security guard stops a resident at a gate because he is doing his job. A delivery worker arrives a few minutes later than expected. A technician needs another fifteen minutes to finish a repair. A salon appointment takes longer than planned. A domestic worker is late. A clinic procedure is delayed. These are all ordinary inconveniences. Yet the response to them can reveal whether we experience inconvenience as something that has happened to us, or as something another person has done to us. That small difference can produce extraordinary behaviour. A recent incident in Greater Noida offered a particularly ugly example. A woman at a residential society was filmed abusing and threatening security guards after a late-night quick-commerce delivery worker was stopped at the gate for verification. The confrontation reportedly escalated into casteist abuse and threats of violence, leading to police action after the video circulated. It is easy to dismiss such an incident as the behaviour of one unreasonable person. But what interests me is not simply the anger. It is the assumption underneath it: that because one person has paid for a service, everyone standing between that person and the service can be treated as an obstacle. The customer wanted her delivery. The delivery worker wanted to complete his job. The security guard was enforcing the rules of the society. Each had a legitimate role. Yet a disagreement over a few minutes became a struggle over whose time mattered more. That is where entitlement becomes visible. We are living through an economy that is increasingly organised around making other people’s labour available to us on demand. One company can send an electrician to our home because a switch needs repairing. A delivery platform can bring groceries because we do not want to leave the house. A salon can fit an appointment around our schedule. A technician can arrive at our doorstep because our air-conditioner has stopped working. Quick commerce can bring something we want almost immediately. The remarkable thing about this system is not simply its speed. It is how completely it can hide the labour required to produce that speed. We experience convenience as a button. Somebody else experiences it as traffic, waiting, lifting, driving, repairing, cleaning, carrying and rushing. The customer sees an estimated arrival time. The worker experiences an actual journey. This does not make technology or these services inherently exploitative. They have made life easier, and many workers depend upon them for income. But the design of the modern service economy encourages us to think of labour as something that appears when we ask for it. The person performing it can become secondary to the service itself. The driver becomes the ride. The technician becomes the appointment. The delivery worker becomes the order at the door. And when we stop seeing the person, entitlement becomes easier. There is also something revealing about the language we use. We say that our delivery is late, our technician has not arrived, our appointment has been delayed. Grammatically, this is harmless. But psychologically, it can create a world in which another person’s time becomes part of our possession. Their time is not ours. We have simply paid for a portion of their labour. That is a very different thing. None of this means that customers should accept poor service quietly. A technician can do bad work. A delivery can be delayed unreasonably. A salon can make a mistake. A customer has every right to complain and demand accountability. Respect does not mean pretending that everything is fine. The important distinction is between objecting to someone’s work and diminishing the person doing it. One can say, “This was not done properly,” without saying, “You are beneath me.” One can be frustrated without making another person absorb one’s frustration as punishment. Perhaps that is why the small acts of courtesy matter, even when they cannot solve the larger inequalities of the service economy. Asking a worker how their day was will not improve their wages. Giving a technician tea or coffee will not give them job security. Saying thank you will not fix the larger structures that keep many workers economically vulnerable. But it can do something immediate. It can acknowledge that there is a person inside the transaction. And perhaps that is more important than it sounds. We are usually careful with people whose approval we need or whose power can affect us. We are careful with a senior at work, an important client, a prospective employer, someone we love. We know that our behaviour has consequences. The service provider is different. They may not be able to retaliate. They may not be able to tell us that our behaviour is unacceptable. They may simply have to finish the job, accept the payment and move on to the next customer. That is why these interactions cannot tell us whether we are good people, but they can tell us something about how we behave when we feel entitled. And perhaps that is a more uncomfortable question. Not “Am I a good person?” But “What happens to me when I believe I am entitled to someone else’s time?” I still do not know whether I am a particularly patient person. The people closest to me may continue to disagree. But perhaps the technician at the clinic was not really giving me a compliment about my personality. She was telling me what it felt like to be on the other side of my entitlement. That distinction has stayed with me. Because patience, in such moments, may not simply mean waiting without complaint. Perhaps it means remembering that the person making us wait has a life, a schedule, a body, a bad day and a dignity of their own. And perhaps the smallest test of being a decent human being is this: when we have every reason to believe that another person must accommodate us, do we still remember that they are not here merely to accommodate us? Get the latest CounterCurrents updates delivered straight to your inbox. Disha is a Ph.D. Scholar and Senior Research Fellow at Dr. K. R. Narayanan Centre for Dalit and Minorities Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She is also an independent commentator, writing on a wide range of themes that move between scholarship and everyday life. (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-7124-9438 & LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/dishapranita )