Picture this.
A middle-manager at a large, nearly-trillion-dollar company goes to work every morning where he sees an elderly woman working custodial. Every day for a year and a half, he tries to smile or wave at her, and she ignores him.
Finally, one day, she smiles back. A couple days later, they have a conversation in the break room. Then, a few weeks after that, the man leaves the company and never sees this woman again.
Now I ask you, did this interaction matter?
Did it bring in more money to the company? Did it make the man better at his job? Did it make the elderly woman clean harder?
Did it make the world a little less dark?
There’s no denying, I’ve had a fairly comfortable life. I’ve had a lot of privileges and a lot of opportunities. But, a lot of those opportunities came from generations of hard work.
My maternal grandfather was a handyman. My dad spent quite a bit of time working blue collar jobs (bartender, factory worker, landscaper, cab driver) before he worked his way into a successful white-collar career. His father was a cop, and his forebears worked on the docks and in garbage collection in NYC.
For my own part, I picked up trash and stuffed envelopes to pay for (a tiny amount of) the tuition at my private high school. Then, I briefly worked custodial full-time between my junior and senior years of college. And my very first job out of college was working as a hotel bellhop.
Now, this isn’t to say “I had that one summer job, so I really understand the hard-knock life.”
It’s just to say, I have a soft spot for people with tough jobs.
One moment, or perhaps a series of moments, stands out to me from that summer I worked custodial in college.
After all my bathroom cleaning, one of my daily tasks was to go down the hall through the academic suite and collect everyone’s trash. So, every day I made my way down the hall, feeling a little sheepish about collecting the trash from professors for whom I’d been writing during the previous semester.
One of the first offices in this hallway belonged to a particularly high-ranking person whose job it was to get to know all the students. I collected this person’s trash every day for 3 months, and in all that time, this person never once looked at me, said hello, or thanked me.
This person knew who I was, because I’d been there 3 years. Also, even though this was not my favorite arrangement, I had multiple family members who worked on campus at various times. So, in short, this person knew my whole family.
And yet, not one word of thanks.
I wonder how many muscles it takes to smile? How many calories it takes? How many milliseconds it uses? Remind me to Google this later.
Now for a second story.
Jump ahead 10 years, and I was working on a corporate development team at a large bank where we hashed out multi-million dollar credit card deals. Some of these deals were 130 pages long. Some required all nighters. Not exactly a job for the faint of heart.
I liked the work, but the culture wasn’t the best. It was all ex-consultants, ex-ivy leagues, ex-investment banking people. They were truly the cream of the crop, in terms of raw mental power, writing skills, ambition… and a ruthless drive to win.
In my short stint on the team (an 8 month rotation), I never really got to know my coworkers. We didn’t talk about our personal lives much, even though we worked together (online, because this was during Covid) until 9 p.m. or so most nights. The thing is, no one really cared. When we went to the team Christmas party, I’ve never seen a larger group of more uncomfortable people who had nothing at all to say to each other.
Out of this whole 8 months, one thing that stood out to me was a throwaway comment my boss’s boss made. It was something along the lines of “I don’t give a crap about the name of the person who works in the cafeteria.” (Now that’s not an exact quote, but you get the gist).
It was a comment made in passing for the sake of humor.
You might say it was also a kind of all-American workaholic badge of honor: “I work so hard here I don’t have time to worry about that kind of stuff.”
To be fair, when you’re working on credit card deals that are going to affect millions of customers, this attitude is somewhat understandable.
However, what about when you’ve been working in the same office for 25 years?
Really? You don’t know the names of anyone in the cafeteria? Obviously, this seems like an exaggeration, and it probably was, but I observed my team leader in the cafeteria and realized that he truly, simply didn’t have time for anyone.
All that said, you may be asking yourself, why does any of this matter?
Is smiling at the custodial worker or saying hello to the cafeteria worker going to save money, bring in more customers, or affect our Christmas bonuses?
Work is about making money, right? Or at least, about providing services to people that they need (in order to make money!)?
Obviously, businesses only exist to create value. If we all went to work and simply had fun, every business would shut down pretty quick.
That said, what does it cost? Is it really that hard to be kind?
Will your multi-million-dollar credit card deal fall through because you cracked a smile or asked your teammate about their weekend?
Is saying hello to the cafeteria worker going to make you late on sending that email?
And when we’re all buried in a hole in the ground, will being 5 min. late on that email really matter?
You might not win at every job.
You might be told after all those all-nighters that you should have worked harder. You might have your position eliminated unceremoniously.
You can’t control everything that happens to you. But you can control how you treat people.
Saying hello to that custodial worker probably won’t impact the bottom line. But, not saying hello might make the world a darker place.
I don’t know about you, but that’s not what I signed up for.
Life is tough.
At least win at being kind.
It is heartening to see a young person giving so much value to the virtue of kindness, every act of kindness, compassion is noted by the universe,what you give will come back to you manifold,may not be from the same person but come it surely will, excellent essay 😊👌
Such a compelling exhortation. I too have been on both sides. And there’s been a cost. Thank you, for exemplifying a better way.