Things I’ll Never Do Again: Wear A Name Tag

Posted: March 14th, 2009 | Author: miconian | Filed under: Work | Tags: bad jobs, magazine subscriptions, name tags, nametags, restaurant | Comments

I’ve done a lot of thinking about whether are really any limits to the kind of situation I’d be wiling to find myself in to acheive a meaningful change. And I’ve decided that the main criteria is this: I’m not going to wear a name tag.

I’ve done it before, when I was the host at a restaurant. There’s a very old and true idea that naming something gives you power over it. The customers don’t have nametags, and the staff do. So any customer can look at any staff member and know something about them that’s very important and personal: what their parents decided to call them.

Knowing a name gives power to the knower, because once you know what something is called, you can start to put it in categories, assign value to it, remember it more easily, refer back to it later, and find it when you want it.

Can you imagine going to a party, and introducing yourself to everyone, and nobody introducing themselves in return, or even bothering to acknowledge the introduction? That’s what it feels like to wear a nametag.

I once had a job selling magazine subscription renewals on the phone. I quit because I was required to give my name, my real name, when the prospective customer picked up the phone.

“May I speak to Mr. Smith?”

“Who should I say is calling?”

“Michael Cohn.”

“Michael who? Cohn. Just a minute.”

And then from the background, some living room far away that I would never see or know, I would hear my great grandfather’s name spoken from a child to a parent, I would hear the parent’s skeptical repetition, the sigh, and then the footsteps toward the phone.

The former magazine subscriber would then pick up the phone, and speak to me with an indignation that I shared on his behalf. The angrier he got, the more I tried to stick to the script in the laminated book that was laid out like a flowchart.

Usually, I would make it through the call with only a medium-sized helping of shame. But once in a while, I would call someone truly observant and intelligent, a seasoned businessman or lawyer who would actually bother to remember the name of the kid calling him to sell magazines, and would say my name in the course of his refusal, like this:

“Michael, I just want to thank you for calling me. But Michael, I don’t think I’ll be needing any more issues of Time magazine this year. What do you think about that, Michael?”

And I would tell him that made perfect sense, and then I would hang up.

image by GIRLintheCAFE

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