"A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem"
About this Quote
Cold arithmetic in a warm profession: that is the sting of Conan Doyle's line. "A mere unit" lands like a rebuke to the sentimental myth of the compassionate professional. The phrasing is almost deliberately dehumanizing, not because it celebrates cruelty, but because it dramatizes a mindset: the detective (and, by extension, any rigorous analyst) survives by converting messy human stories into solvable structures. "Factor in a problem" is engineering language smuggled into social life.
The specific intent reads as both characterization and manifesto. Conan Doyle, a trained physician turned writer, understood how easily care work becomes cognitively impossible if every case is absorbed as personal tragedy. The quote performs emotional triage. By reducing a client to a "unit", the speaker protects the capacity to act decisively, to see patterns, to avoid being manipulated by tears, status, or charm. It's the professional's armor: not empathy, but distance.
The subtext is more unsettling: objectivity here is a kind of power. Turning people into variables allows the expert to control the narrative and own the solution. In the Sherlock Holmes universe that sensibility is thrilling because it produces clarity in a fog of Victorian hypocrisy, class performance, and moral panic. In real life it edges toward commodification, the client as input rather than person.
It works because it refuses to apologize. The bluntness is the point: a Victorian-era wager that reason, stripped of romance, can still deliver justice - even if it makes the deliverer look a little inhuman.
The specific intent reads as both characterization and manifesto. Conan Doyle, a trained physician turned writer, understood how easily care work becomes cognitively impossible if every case is absorbed as personal tragedy. The quote performs emotional triage. By reducing a client to a "unit", the speaker protects the capacity to act decisively, to see patterns, to avoid being manipulated by tears, status, or charm. It's the professional's armor: not empathy, but distance.
The subtext is more unsettling: objectivity here is a kind of power. Turning people into variables allows the expert to control the narrative and own the solution. In the Sherlock Holmes universe that sensibility is thrilling because it produces clarity in a fog of Victorian hypocrisy, class performance, and moral panic. In real life it edges toward commodification, the client as input rather than person.
It works because it refuses to apologize. The bluntness is the point: a Victorian-era wager that reason, stripped of romance, can still deliver justice - even if it makes the deliverer look a little inhuman.
Quote Details
| Topic | Customer Service |
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