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Age! - The midlife column: OMG, I'm a "Karen" now

2020-10-06T20:59:49.871Z


When overpowering corporations fool me, I recently started calling for the managing director. I am not at all neglected. But you can't put up with everything.


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Columnist Juno Vai

Photo: 

Roman Pawlowski / DER SPIEGEL

My children used to be convinced that the most embarrassing thing their mother had ever done was a role on the horizontal bar.

When you pick them up from school, "totally random", in front of your classmates.

Today they know: that was just the beginning.

Because I'm a "Karen" now.

You don't pronounce it like the name of my friend from Flensburg or the persecuted minority in Myanmar.

No, they say English [ˈkaːʁən].

Because Karen is a new species from the USA, a kind of prototype of the annoying middle-aged blonde who tends to complain and calls for the manager in shops.

She wears an asymmetrical bob, is aggressive, racist, and presumptuous - the epitome of the privileged shoddy who bulldozes her way through the world. 

Oh, I think.

The reason for my reclassification was the purchase of a tablet for my daughter.

The device started producing erratic images on the first day.

To dinosaurs like me, it looked like good old loose contact.

"Let's just give it back," I thought.

We drove into the city, where the manufacturer maintains a two-storey consumer temple with a view of the water, which promises coolness, lightness and service.

We waited a long time.

At one point a stocky young man who looked like my son's fourteen-year-old skater bro 'came up to us.

"What did you do with it?" The salesman asked reproachfully.

I felt an ice-cold hand wander up my neck.

"I didn't do anything with it, but you should definitely refrain from speaking to me because I could be your grandmother," I said.

"No, you", he replied, "I can't do that, my branch manager told me that."

"Something is not right"

At that point, my daughter looked up at me, worried, trying to mediate with a smile.

That failed when the specialist restarted the device after some listless navigation on the touchscreen and came to the conclusion, "Something's wrong".

I was in Karen top form by now.

"Oh, wow, surprise!" I called.

How about simply exchanging the defective device?

"No, you, we'll take a look, make an appointment," said the skater.

You can imagine how it went on.

I was foaming, the skater was calling for a colleague with experience of de-escalation, my daughter was ashamed to death.

"Oh my god, mom, you are such a Karen," she moaned.

The fact that the seller looked like he might have Latin American roots didn't exactly make it any better.

Of course, my big one didn't believe me that I hadn't noticed that out of sheer anger.

I was a racist Karen now.

It's hard to boycott the company's products

Actually, I was old enough to know that Germany is a service wasteland.

I've also had lousy jobs myself for years with customer contact and I think that in principle you should be nice to the staff, because there are enough madmen who spoil his day.

But I had this totally old-fashioned idea in mind that brand-new but defective devices could be replaced by the manufacturer without any problems.

All the more so from a corporation that made a net profit of 55.26 billion US dollars last year and is known for its creative tax-saving models and poor working conditions at suppliers.

The customer was accused of deceiving the warranty.

The store operator in Germany had employees monitored by video.  

Unfortunately, it is difficult to boycott the company's products.

My employer buys his cell phones, my son's school buys the tablets and my daughter is already crazy about brands - a "system victim", as she explains self-deprecatingly but without consequences.

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I got very angry and very loud

That's why she recently wanted to buy a keyboard for the loose-contact tablet that had returned to our possession after several weeks.

Because the experience with the large service center was miserable, we consulted a smaller shop, a "premium reseller".

Also to support the retail trade in Corona times.

We showed the seller the device, he handed us a keyboard, and we went home.

It's just stupid that the keyboard didn't fit, but the next day the store refused to take it back because there was supposedly no wrong advice.

The terminal device for the keyboard was never seen.

In short: the staff lied.

My Karen attempt to speak to the branch manager Mr. Pein also failed after five attempts.

"You can sell the keyboard on Ebay," recommended one seller smugly.

At this point a bright white flash discharged in the frontal lobe of my brain.

I got very angry and very loud.

De-escalation experts would probably have attested to me a "dysfunctional complaint behavior" with "aggressive self-assertion".

No point in taking legal action against it, said my lawyer.

Boring, yawned the woman at the consumer advice center.

Fainting and loss of control

It wasn't about the money, but about the audacity with which my complaint was thwarted.

I felt ripped off, fainted, cursed corporate power.

I lost control.

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Have we all become a little more impatient, nastier, more aggressive?

I ask around the neighborhood a bit.

"It's like hand-to-hand combat here, every day," says the lady at the post office counter, naturally not representative.

Whoever works here shouldn't have thin skin.

"People have been really aggro for a few years now, but the corona crisis has made things worse."

It is clear to me what to do with my aggression.

I will transform it into a juvenile anti-capitalism, use it to fight against monopoly structures.

That would be a cool variant of Karen.

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Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2020-10-06

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