Today's post is inspired by the many offices I visited today.
If you are asked one question while you are in São Paulo, it is likely to be the following:
"O/a senhor/a já foi atendindo?" ["Has the gentleman/lady been served/attended to?"]
One friend who grew up in Brasilia, the capital, joked that atendimento is a very São Paulo social artifice. Being attended to, in the most traditional scenario, involves arriving at an office and being immediately greeted by a receptionist. This receptionist or assistant will offer you coffee, which they will not bring. Rather, another cleaning/kitchen assistant is chamado [called] to bring you an espresso or water. And often the receptionist will take coffee with you, while you both wait for the receptionist's boss to become available. Being attended to gives the office visitor a sense of social status and esteem. Of course, not as much status or esteem as the boss who is too busy to see you at the mutually-agreed upon time. Atendimento is, thus, a social mediation of sorts between senhores [gentlemen].
As the consumer and service economies have expanded rapidly, so has the practice of atendimento and the pretensions to treat every client as a gentleman or lady. Last week, as I was shopping for a mattress, one salesman encouraged me to sit down so we could discuss the price, and motioned for another saleswoman to bring me coffee. What was particularly interesting about this encounter (beyond the gender dynamic that played out), was that this store had some of the lower-end mattresses and prices that I had visited that day. In effect, its atendimento practice was more self-consciously aspirational and over-compensatory than 'second nature.' Also, good atendimento over the phone is seen as a requisite business practice. No customer or client complaint is as damning as: 'eu fui mal atendido.' [I was poorly served.]
More under the fold
Atendimento also serves as a mode of social distinction and discrimination. Often, I have heard the condescending complaint that many receptionists or service workers simply don't know how to offer proper atendimento. Not that the people who say this would know how to poor a good cup of coffee...but that's not their job! Finally, in São Paulo's more commercial and presumably cosmopolitan district, LGBT advocates and activists decry when a queer person is refused service at a commercial establishment [não foi antendido]. This usually happens in two ways. One, a couple (usually two men, but also two women) are asked to leave a restaurant after publicly displaying affection. Two, a travesti or transexual who is visibly not bio-normative is flat-out refused service. One time, I had an interview cut short, when an activist rushed to a McDonald's after receiving a text that a travesti was refused atendimento.
On that note, I am going to close this post with a music video, "Atendimento" by the late Claudia Wonder, travesti icon, writer, and activist. In the chorus, Claudia voices a receptionist telling her client interlocutor:
"Sim, faço...faço...faço..." [Yes, I do that, I do that, I do that.]
"Não, isso não faço. Não! Isso não FAço!" [No, that I don't do. No! That I DON'T do.]
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