It was jarring at first – even my chit chat with the man from Customs and Border Protection was unfailingly friendly – but there’s really something to be said for the standards of customer service I’ve experienced since being in the US.
My left-brain is telling me that this is the way they’ve been trained, or that it’s because I’m in a state full of marijuana and microbreweries, or more likely that it’s because I’m suddenly immersed in a consumer culture disproportionately that tops up meagre salaries with tips.
But my right-brain is telling me to chill out and enjoy the feeling. Somewhere deep down, it turns out that I’m a human – and every time someone hopes that I have a great day, smiles at my arrival at the front of a queue or apologises for a minor mix up, I sense the endorphin hit.
And given I appear to be pretty much the only Brit at a huge corporate ed-tech conference in the middle of a huge convention centre attached to a huge leisure resort on the outskirts of Aurora in Denver, it’s also both made me feel both welcome and more able to participate in and learn from the event and its myriad fringe discussions on everything from course design to remote learning and generative AI.
