Five people I never met wished me a Happy Friday last Friday by email. You can pretty much be wished a happy anything nowadays, except perhaps Easter, since this assumes you share in the joy of the Resurrection. The London lights now say Happy Ramadan. Actually, if I were wished a Happy Lent it’d be the equivalent of telling me ‘Happy Abstinence’.
The point is it is one more notch in the creeping commodification of goodwill, the conformity of niceness. Happy Friday is a way for strangers to introduce themselves on a note of cheer, since they’re trying to get you interested in an event or a product. But they don’t know you. It’s the assumption that you’re already friends that’s so galling.
I was sent an invitation to Dame Sarah Mullally’s installation as Archbishop of Canterbury (swank, swank), but I was taken aback when the email responding to my ‘glad to accept’ began: ‘Hi Melanie.’ Communications from my bank are also often prefaced with ‘Hi, Melanie’, even though the message may be turning down a plea for an overdraft. The wounding rejection is at odds with the chatty opener.
The flight from the social norms of formality has been a long time coming and appears to be premised on the notion that anything other than easy familiarity is de facto hostility. Last week a customer at Woolworths Australia reported that an AI bot called Olive responded to her date of birth by observing that it was also her mother’s date of birth. To which the only response is: ‘No, Olive, you are a bot; you lack a mother.’
A friendly manner is a fine thing in a soulless world. (My uncle used to call women ‘dear’ as an indication of goodwill, until a feminist from a property management company ranted at him for misogyny.) But the assumption that you’re already mates is what a previous generation would have called taking liberties. The other night I tried to get in touch with BT to cancel a visit from an engineer the following morning. On the website I was invited to ‘chat’, which is what you used to do with a friend. Someone called Armad responded, saying he’d cancel the engineer but meanwhile might he have my details? I gave them. He responded: ‘Awesome! I have verified the account. As promised I’ll cancel the appointment right away. However, how’s your day going so far? Have you finished dinner?’
All good, I said. So would he sort out the appointment? Sure, he said. Did I want anything more? No, thank you, I said. He came back with: ‘Thank you for contacting us today. It was a lovely conversation with you and have a wonderful rest of your day. Goodbye. Smiley emoji.’
He then added: ‘I want to acknowledge that you have been extremely helpful and polite with me throughout the conversation. Though, my shift got ended at 9.00. However, assisting you I have not checked the time. Now I’ll log off for the day.’
Look, I would only ask my friends if they’ve had their dinner before talking. I don’t want to tell a stranger how my day has been. I wasn’t extremely polite; I was just normal. It wasn’t awesome. And I didn’t need to know about his shift, but took the hint and responded with 9/10 feedback. That was before I found, the following morning, that Armad had not cancelled the engineer.
How have we got to the point where we can’t talk to people on the street or even look at people on the Tube (posters discourage staring) in case someone takes offence, but find ourselves on terms of over-familiarity with strangers?
One problem is that we are in uncharted waters in the post-formal era. Once there were formulae for dealing with strangers: ‘Dear Sir/Madam, good evening, how can I help?’ And finishing, ‘Kind regards’, ‘Yours faithfully’ or ‘Do you require anything further?’ We have fewer rules. What we have instead is a fear of perceived hierarchy which translates into fear of formality.
Over-familiarity is part of the broader culture of niceness, whereby being friendly is seen as non-confrontational in a world where people are ready to take offence. It’s also a commercial thing. A recent book by Timothy Hampton on cheerfulness noted that what was once a spiritual quality (St Paul’s advice to rejoice in the Lord or American Calvinists smiling because they were saved) is ‘a distant echo… now largely stripped of its spiritual underpinnings’. When you consider that society is more ethnically and culturally mixed, the perpetual niceness becomes a formula to deal with potential hostility: bad feedback; offence-taking which can turn litigious; not knowing what the boundaries are because we’re culturally strangers.
Let’s not go there. Instead, let’s channel that bloke who, when invited to have a nice day, responded: ‘Thank you, but I have other plans.’
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