My young friends told me the same story as the novelist: People don’t see them when they’re behind the counter. They might greet the customer by name and he’d looked confused or even annoyed, till something in his brain would click and he realized he was speaking to someone he knew. They were the help, and invisible.

Writing novels not paying the bills, Camilla Grudova worked as a server at the same arts center where her own book had been launched and she’d been a celebrity. People she knew “would disdainfully ‘shoo shoo’ me away with my tray whenever I offered them more hors d’oeuvres. It can be like skipping from one reality to another, as if the attendees have changed masks, from friendly to ghoulish.”

When so many people in our national life flaunt their cruelty and their enjoyment of the pain they’re causing other people, almost always (of course) the vulnerable and marginalized, we need to do better than them. We can’t stop them on our own, but we can retard their degradation of our national character by doing what they refuse to do.

That includes treating “the help” — fast food workers, servers in restaurants, cashiers in stores, delivery people, all the people so many people don’t notice — as human beings as important as yourself.

Part of the faceless mob

Among other experiences, one friend told me, he’d had a kid in the drive through at the burger place off the Turnpike where he worked throw a giant-sized cup of Coke in his face and drive off laughing. It was apparently a viral fad at the time.

Other kids late at night would play a game smashing salt shakers onto spinning quarters to crack the shakers, so when he cleared the table at almost 3:00 in the morning, when he just wanted to get home, the salt would go everywhere and he’d have to clean it up.

Adults didn’t do that kind of thing, but they could be unbelievably rude and insulting, and sometimes threatening.

I asked him for his general idea about the experience. “You become part of the faceless mob,” he said. “They think, ‘It’s a fast-food place. I don’t care who it is. Just give me my burger.’ It’s so built into society that those are throwaway people.”

Pouncing on prey

“It seemed to be one in every five customers,” said another young friend who’d worked at one of the nicer fast food places in a very affluent community, speaking of the difficult customers. Customers were rudest about their orders.

After the clerk carefully took down the customer’s orders, orders often complicated and “I want it just so” fussy, and repeated it back to them, and they agreed, they would get their sandwich and claim someone had made a mistake.

That would have been all right, but many were very certain, very rude, and quick to call the workers stupid. “None of them could imagine that their minds could be so fragile that they could make a mistake and forget what they actually ordered,” he said.

I knew him back then and had stood at the back of the line a few times and watched the event he described. I remember thinking of one customer, an older woman, that she looked alert, and a little hunched and tense, like a tiger about to spring on its prey. And she did spring, straightening up as she went from complaint to haughty, patronizing insult in about half a second.

Everyone I spoke to who’d ever been “the help” had similar stories.

Rotten and rude

Those experiences tell you a lot about people. Working as a server, Grudova noted, writing in the English magazine Granta, “I learned who was rotten and who was rude, as it is often those types, even if you have met them before, who won’t recognise you once you are wearing a staff shirt.”

My friends — all now in their 30s and with better jobs with less abuse from the public, though perhaps more abuse from their bosses — told their stories with some detachment. “In hindsight,” said one, “I don’t remember it being really all that bad.” The work, including the abuse, was something they’d had to go through to get where they are now.

If I read them right, though of course they didn’t like the rudeness and abuse, the treatment that most bothered them was being treated as if they didn’t really exist — being faceless, as the thrown Coke victim said.

My young friends are all strong people, with the emotional and other resources to survive mistreatment. But many other people haven’t and can’t.

The saying goes that character is what you do when no one’s looking. That’s not quite right. Character is what you do when no one you care about is looking — how you treat people whether or not you care about them, whether you treat them as human beings or as things.

“How someone treats staff is the real mark of their character,” Grudova wrote. “I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.”

“I don’t think any human being entering the work force should not be part of the service industry,” my first friend said. Being mistreated should make you kinder to others, he explained — and being kinder makes the world, ever so slightly, a better place.

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