-Business Cards and Breath Mints

"Hold them up!", she exhorted us, "If you have them, and you should, I want to see them!"

It was obvious most of us couldn't comply. All of us, seated in rows of cheap classroom chairs, looked around at one another to see who among us made the grade. In the group of some fifty coworkers, only two of the salespeople traveled through their work week in full possession of the two key tools our speaker advocated: Breath mints and business cards. They showed them off with pride, waving nyah-nyah hands.

She'd come to aid us in our mandatory quarterly professional development. Primarily a business etiquette expert, she provided hand-outs, facilitated role-plays and delivered words of wisdom on, essentially, personal presentation. It was a sell yourself seminar--Tony Robbins on a budget.

Since we'd mostly failed to pass the acid test with the cards and mints, she likely found in us a worthy audience. From the copious note-taking happening around me, you'd have thought she was giving out winning lottery numbers. We learned lots of ways to shake hands, transfer business cards among peers and superiors, and introduce people to one another in correct, class-conscious fashion.

Now that I know that the hand-over-hand shake is best reserved for greeting grievers at a funeral, I can reflect a little more closely on the bare-bones message she sent that day. As my coworkers highlighted the handouts and scribbled notes in margins, I wondered how many of them knew this information already, common sensically, and how many of them knew how little use it would really be next week at the supermarket.

About a third of the folks listening with me were sales people in one form or another. They asked most of the questions, inserting snide comments about each other into the questions. Sales people always think they have to be funny in any meeting, it's a given. Had it been just the sales people in the room, the role plays would have been a real hoot, and the presentation would have made a lot more sense.

For the remainder of us, little of what she was saying had any practical value whatsoever. It was a feel-good exercise in lost productivity and "empowerment". Worse than the wasted time and false aggrandizement we were led to feel (as if we might one day need to know how to acquaint a royal and a commoner!), was the reduction of our personhood to packaging.

The altar call for our mints and cards was just the culmination of a longer sermon on the need to present one's self in a professional manner at all times: Polished shoes, groomed hair, clean nails and clothes appropriate to both season and venue. It was an ambitious one-hour presentation, to be sure.

I don't mean to argue for an week-long extension of casual Fridays, or to suggest I'd enjoy an office full of unwashed bodies. But what would life in that office, or down the street, be like if we, sales people and all, were less concerned with shoe polish, titles and bank accounts? Free of that world in my recovery from surgery, I look back at its hollowness with some degree of horror.

I polish my shoes--I'll say that. As our speaker asked us to stretch out our hands with proof of corporate citizenship, I checked my wallet and pockets like all of those around me, feeling just a little disappointed in myself--I came up short on both counts. Never having been a particularly successful joiner, there is a strong part of me that wants and seeks out inclusion. I had a title, and brush often, but for just a moment, I felt inadequate, incomplete.

There it was: If I am not moving through this life with fresh breath and a pocket full of my essence boiled down to wallet-sized card stock, I wasn't serving my company, or building Brand Me. Failure.


Um . . . fuck you, ma'am.

Surely there is some better way, somewhere, to determine our worth in the world and to each other. There is no need to point out the naivete and neglect of the profit motive in my plea--I get it.

I guess what I am suggesting is that I'd not like to be in the office at all, stinky breath and bodies notwithstanding. Casual forever, unless I damn well want to dress, and I just might want to for a month in a row, or not, I'll decide.

Some stink and dirt don't respond, even to the strongest soap.