Becoming your parents

Rick Morain

A series of ads on TV over the last few months haven’t tripped my trigger. I have finally figured out why.

In those ads, an older guy with a trimmed white mustache tries to teach middle-aged guys how not to become their parents. Not only did the ads leave me pretty cold, but I couldn’t remember the company sponsoring them. Doesn’t say a lot either for me or for the company — probably some of both. I had to look up whose ads they were.

The ads show the male subjects engaging in small talk with providers whose services they are soliciting: cabbies, clerks, doormen, etc. The older mustachioed fellow keeps reminding them not to bother the help: just conduct your transaction and move on. (A note of serendipity for me: according to Google, the old guy is named “Dr. Rick.”)

The message seems to be that visiting with the staff is old-fashioned, that up-to-date fellas do their business as though dealing with a robot or an online website. Your dad, Dr. Rick suggests, may have been lovable, but his patter in a store was out of place: the employees would have preferred a quick transaction without the folderol.

I’m slow to the answer sometimes, and this was one of them. But it dawned on me that the reason small talk could be seen as out of place in a transaction might be that in a bustling urban environment, taking time to say a few words might actually slow the pace of business.

Even a short conversation would prevent the provider from achieving maximum production volume. The variety of formats for Dr. Rick’s message suggests that extraneous words are quaint in any commercial situation.

My long-time experience in small-town America is the opposite. A shopper in a store, or a patron of a service, in most non-metro Iowa towns is expected to exchange a few friendly remarks with the clerk. If George conducts his transactions pretty much in silence for a few days, people in town will be saying, “What’s wrong with George?”

Silence in such situations can lead to the dreaded rumor that “George is pretty stuck up,” or even worse, “He thinks he’s better than everybody else.” Few appellations are more to be feared in small-town culture.

Garrulousness is of course out of line. Continuous gabbing that destroys the employee’s concentration on the task at hand is unacceptable. But to suggest that doing so is what your parents customarily indulged in back then is misplaced, in my opinion. Most people of my parents’ generation didn’t commit that social error in places of business.

If the trendy thing today is to move stone-faced through the commercial world, I’ll take my chances with emulating my parents. I do that most of the time anyway.

Rick Morain is a reporter and columnist with the Jefferson Herald.