Surely there is a balance between the Western customer service model -- where phalanxes of phone agents with little power to make right, offer focus-group tested sweets, like "how can we provide you with excellent customer service?" to a consumer audience hypnotized by a radio-man's impersonation of natural conversation, sing-songing about the importance of your call -- and the Eastern way, where every corporate representative is super-empowered to cut a different deal with each customer, gouging the tourist and upgrading the buddy, or helpfully, overruling the official line to solve a customer problem.

There is solace in the Western model, knowing that a defined set of rules govern consumer relationships, where the computer CRM system, with its litany of if-thens, and the marketing department, with its pie charts of platinum points, can be relied on to provide consistency, wrongheaded or not.

And there is frustration in the Eastern model, always wondering if there was a better deal to be had, or if prolonging a debate would have, in the end, made the other side cave.

Between these poles should exist a company that treats its customer interactions not as an opportunity to up-sell and cross-sell using marketing scripts that insult intelligence, and not as an opportunity to bargain until heart failure, but as human interactions, without the overt Eastern sales pressure, or the subversive Western "helpfulness."