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Thursday, June 30, 2005

Have a Nice Day, Convict

How is a fairly misanthropic person like me supposed to deal with grotesquely cheerful coffee shop employees hurling imperatives like “Have a great day,” and other corporate-approved forms of non communication? As a transplanted easterner I find this faux friendliness particularly disturbing. I have found Seattle to be an especially friendly city--whatever the hell that means. I think what that means is when you walk down the street and make accidental eye contact with the person walking towards you, there is a good chance they won’t bark out, “What the fuck are you looking at?”

I think a lot of east coast manners have trickled down from our violent prison system. From the death row school of etiquette common on the streets of Washington D.C., Baltimore, Miami, and a lot of other violent eastern cities, we come to the Pacific Northwest. Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, British Columbia didn’t learn their manners in the prison yard, they inherited them from their parents who seem to have been Ned Flanders and Julie Andrews from The Sound of Music. People here prefer to keep Darwin in the textbooks. Survival of the fittest isn’t something you learn walking on a downtown street.

Perhaps Seattle, being slightly behind the times, will adopt the gangster, prison-chic attitude of personal relations that is the style in bigger American cities. I think that politeness is some sort of recessive gene, a trait that will be overrun and conquered by rudeness. It has been extremely difficult for me to adapt to west coast manners. The attitude here is not exactly “Love Thy Neighbor,” it is more like “There is nothing gained by being a complete asshole to total strangers.”

After serving my sentence in a couple of eastern cities I have been slowly evolving into a polite Seattleite. When someone—usually a service industry employee—practically ordered me to “have a nice day,” I never knew how to respond. The same was true of other linguistic sawdust like “Have a good one.” I know these people mean well but I never knew what to say in return. I usually just gave an audible grunt that sounded like something between a burp and a fart. It’s not that I was trying to be rude; I honestly didn’t know how to answer. Some of the responses I used in the past didn’t work out so well.

--Fuck off!
--No, YOU have a nice day, goddammit!
--OK, I WILL have a nice day and when I do you’ll feel like a total idiot with your insincere taunts.
--What do you mean by “nice?”

I finally settled on “Thank you.”

I can be excused my rudeness because in other cities far to the east of Seattle, these kind of exchanges are meant to put you off guard. Street smart people know that what comes next is someone trying to put a shiv in you, or beat you to death with a lunch tray lifted from the prison cafeteria. What I have learned in my stay here in Seattle is not to read too much into what people say. Like on the east coast, when someone tells you to fuck off, most of the time it just means to fuck off. Don’t look for some hidden meaning. When someone here tells me to have a nice day, sometimes that is all they are saying.

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