George Carlin’s latest and last book: A Modern Man: The Best of George Carlin, includes a section of short takes called Short Takes. He almost wrote it as a letter to future readers, and it inspired me so much that I decided to write back.
“Most people aren’t particularly good at anything,” George Carlin wrote. “We’re all amateurs. It’s just that some of us are more professional about it than others.”
Most of the truly impressive people I’ve met, didn’t impress me at hello. Their impressions involve a slow build that can take days, sometimes weeks to process, until they ended up in a little, yellow piece of paper, similar to those that came out of computers in old sci-fi shows. In my experience, most truly impressive people rarely try to impress us at hello.
“Please, don’t call me Mr. Duggin,” specialists and those who’ve attained various levels of authority often say in a handshake. “Call me Henry.”
“I understand that you’re trying to impress me with your humility,” we should say to Henry, “but could you wait until we’ve felt each other out here a little bit?” I could be wrong, of course, but I think they consider the ‘Call me Henry’ hello a shortcut to impressions through humility. They’re basically saying, ‘Hey, I’m just another peon, like you.’ All right, well, I didn’t consider you particularly extraordinary, until you said that. Wow, your humility is so impressive, but if you are truly humble, why the need to impress it upon me? What are you hoping to accomplish here? Is Henry as impressive as he wants us to believe, or is so uncomfortable, in general, that he hasn’t adapted to the societal norm of addressing someone we don’t know with a prefix followed by their surname? He has, of course, but Henry Duggin is hoping to short-circuit these dynamics, so we consider him more humble, more professional, and more impressive. Henry wants us to consider the idea that only an all-that-and-a-bag-of-chips guy would demand informalities.
When I had a “Please, call me Henry” as a boss, I tried to think of a time when I arrived at a familial link with a boss who allowed me to call him Henry in the privacy of a corporate boardroom. I know others enjoy this. I’ve seen that warm glow and those blushing smiles of euphoria on their faces. They appreciate the gesture of a boss reaching down to touch them on a familial link, but I see it as Henry’s method of reinforcing his leadership mystique.
“Why do you keep calling him Mr. Duggin?” they asked me. “He wants us to call him Henry.”
“Because that’s the way I was raised,” I lie. “I was taught that you address a boss as Mr. or Ms. Duggin. It isn’t intended as a compliment or an insult that I refuse to call him Henry. It’s just the way I was raised.” In truth, I feel queasy calling him Henry, because I feel like I’m feeding into his narcissistic humility.
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