Bring up the subject of rotten customer service and the survivor stories pour forth.

One woman walked out of a store after waiting 10 minutes for two clerks behind the counter to stop yakking with each other and help her, which never happened. As she walked out the door, one of the clerks said, "I think she wanted something."

One man said the service is so consistently bad at a place that serves food he likes that he almost thinks of it as entertainment, like "Let's see how rude they're gonna be TODAY!"

A family disappointed by their lousy dinner asked to speak to the restaurant manager, who curtly told them, "Oh yeah? Well, good. Don't come back then."

But it must be said that the counterpart to bad service is the nasty customer — people snarling at one another in the aisles or "making big body" in line at the fast food joint or demanding in the most obnoxious ways that everyone pay attention to them and heed their demands immediately.

Maybe the rude clerks and waiters are misplacing their anger and resentment. Maybe they're scared to take on the tigers so they lash out at the lambs.

Fifty years ago, business owners in Honolulu listed their at-home, after-hours phone numbers in the city directory. Imagine allowing that kind of access decades before caller ID or voice mail. Not just physicians and plumbers, but all sorts of businesses. We may have the iPhone now, but if you accidentally drop it in the tub no way are you going to get the guy who sold it to you on the phone at home after hours, unless he's your cousin. (Even then, he probably won't pick up).

How many business people would invite that kind of intrusiveness into their private lives today? Customers, clients and random strangers freely unload their complaints and entitlements and snarky opinions; when you get home, you just want to pull up the drawbridge, turn off the phone and go missing for a while.

Perhaps the root of this ill, or at least a contributing factor, is the culture of reality television, where the best of the worst-behaved get their own show. Be mean and abusive and profane and high-maintenance and you can be a star.

People used to be embarrassed to seem impolite. It was a shameful thing for regular folks to be needy or demanding. It was something disdained, not envied, the fatal flaw in the kids that toured Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. People used to want to be like sweet Charlie Bucket.

By today's values, Veruca Salt would get the chocolate factory in the end because she "wanted it bad enough to go hard for it." We no longer see that sort of behavior as the weakness it is.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.