the good old days

Another tidbit of Office Etiquette dedicated to my fellow co-workers desperately seeking their next place of employment…

Unless you’re willing to sleep with the boss, you can’t call him by his first name.

Excerpted from a story in Love Romances #82 (July 1952) — thanks to Sleestak.

Typically cheesy romance-comic plot aside, it is damned annoying to see secretaries (or any woman in an office environment) called by their first name while male co-workers and superiors are entitled to the full respect of being called Mister Somebody.

The modern version is allowing everybody to use first names, but a surprising number of men think it’s just great to call me “sweetie” or “hon”. (This is almost always done by guys of a certain age. Except that snotty engineer my own age who’s just a total fucking idiot…) Many of them are in sales, trying to convince me to buy their piece of industrial equipment. Do they really think that sleazy overfamiliarity is likely to make me overlook an inflated price list and bad OEM-restrictive design?

So, your lesson for today: creepy pickup lines are not a reasonable substitution for good customer (or co-worker) rapport.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 9:16 am and is filed under Etiquette, feminism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.