How often I open Facebook and see some doctor complaining about a patient, exposing situations from the office, posting selfies in the operating room or at the dentist’s. Lawyers complaining about clients who don’t know how to make requests or don’t know the correct terms in their field. Architects and ad people mocking clients who struggle to explain what they want. Headhunters on LinkedIn complaining that candidates don’t know how to write a résumé and don’t show up for interviews. The relationship between professional and patient is already delicate in the physical world, with contracts that require confidentiality about the information exchanged between the two. When this moves online, it becomes even more delicate. A news story last year about a doctor who mocked a patient online for the words the patient used opened people’s eyes to this situation for a brief period. The doctor and two other staff members were suspended, but within a few weeks the case was forgotten and thousands of similar incidents went unnoticed.
They say cell phones are dirtier than toilets. How do cell phones even get into operating rooms? There are hundreds and hundreds of “funny” messages, written to vent or as a joke. But behind these posts, do we really have professionals who care about their clients? Who respect patients’ rights and their own obligations as service providers? Perhaps there is something magical and appealing in these professionals’ minds when they expose their clients and patients in a humiliating way, with an implicit air of superiority over the patient. “How f@#ing great I am,” the professional would say. “How ridiculous,” they would say about the patient. We can call this need to appear superior a Messiah Complex or a Superiority Complex. The urge to show how hard it is to deal with people who are ignorant about your field is an urge that serious professionals, and especially humane ones, quickly see as contemptible. This recent United Airlines case doesn’t surprise me at all. Terrible professionals are everywhere, but at least, when they expose themselves online, I know which professionals to avoid when I need their services. This kind of thing very easily echoes negatively across the market; after all, in today’s connected, tech-driven world, everything you do will be seen.
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