I hear all the time about stupid customers in shops. You know, people complaining inanely about trivial things, people with a daft sense of entitlement, that sort of thing.

I am also aware of an issue that crops up all the time with both my vocal experiments and my guitar playing, and that is that we often have no idea what we look like or what we sound like until we see or hear ourselves from a third-person perspective. Of course, we all like to think we know exactly how we look and sound, but we are wrong. It is a standard feature of my life that I record something thinking “hey, that was pretty good”, and only upon listening to the recording do I notice the terrible tuning and timing problems. We all seem to be absolutely dreadful at what you might call first-person self-assessment.

A thought has just occurred to me in the shower. What if, as a society, and with a democratic vote, we decided to create a new public service? Here’s how it would go:

Shops would have decent-quality cameras installed at the tills. There are probably already cameras there. Microphones, too, with good noise-canceling properties to improve the audio. Then, when a cashier felt that a particular customer was unreasonable or just plain mental, the footage of their behaviour would be sent to them. And that’s it. They wouldn’t have to watch it, but they would at least receive it. And if they did decide to watch it (out of curiosity, perhaps), maybe they would learn something about themselves.

I can’t help thinking that this sort of feedback has the potential to greatly improve our society. I would love to have the ability to relive awkward moments. There have been times when I’ve walked away from something thinking “what the hell just happened there?”, and I’d love to be able to see it again from a third-person perspective. The ability to review one’s actions at a later time seems to me one of the primary functions vital to improvement in general.

There are of course problems with this idea. There are problems with every idea. One of the main ones is that of privacy. How do you get the irate customer’s home address or email? Isn’t this an invasion of privacy? Aren’t these precisely the people who would not offer it willingly, and aren’t they the very people who would either refuse to watch the footage or stubbornly insist that they were in the right even if they did? What about the prospect of releasing these videos online in order to embarrass someone who was just having a bad day?

Perhaps it wouldn’t work. Sort of wish it would though.