The Name on
the Tag

Her name was printed in large letters three feet from me, and I still almost called her “ma’am.” There is nothing wrong with ma’am. Depending on where you were raised, it may be the more respectful choice. But the name tag made me think about how easily we interact with positions instead of people. Cashier, server, clerk, receptionist, mechanic, nurse. The categories are useful. Without them ordinary life would become unnecessarily difficult. If I walk into a hardware store looking for a particular bolt, I need to find an employee, not conduct an investigation into the interior life of everyone wearing an apron.

Roles help strangers cooperate. Trouble begins when the role becomes all we allow ourselves to see. You can hear it in the way people sometimes speak to someone behind a counter. There is a particular tone reserved for people who are temporarily required to serve us. Not everyone uses it, but enough do that anyone who has spent time dealing with the public recognizes it immediately.

The flight is late. The prescription isn’t ready. The coupon expired. The room isn’t available. The price is wrong. Often the employee standing in front of us had nothing to do with creating the problem, but that doesn’t prevent him from receiving the anger generated by it. There is something psychologically convenient about a counter. It gives frustration an address. The organization may be enormous and invisible, its policies written a thousand miles away and its decisions generated by a computer, but there is a human being three feet from us. So we talk to the corporation through Linda.

I did this myself once, though I didn’t fully realize it until afterward. A hotel had lost a reservation, an actual mistake made months earlier by somebody I would never meet, and I spent several minutes explaining the situation to a man behind the desk in a tone I wouldn’t have used with anyone I knew personally. He fixed the problem quickly and professionally, the way people who deal with this all day usually do, and it was only walking away that I noticed his name tag and realized I hadn’t looked at it once during the entire conversation. I had been talking to a job title. He had been standing there the whole time.

Customers should complain when service is bad. Mistakes deserve correction, and people have every right to expect a business to honor its commitments. Respect does not require accepting incompetence. The question is whether the person standing in front of us remains a person while the problem is being solved.

Names can help, provided we don’t turn them into a technique. Used artificially, a name becomes irritating. Anyone who has endured a conversation in which his name is inserted into every other sentence understands how quickly supposed personalization can feel mechanical. Its value may be less in saying it than in remembering that there is one.

I know one man who seems to remember the name of every person he deals with regularly, from the parking attendant to the pharmacist, and he means it. He holds it as information worth having, the same way he’d remember somebody’s address. When you watch him move through a day, small transactions take on a slightly different tone. People straighten up a little when he says their name back to them. Nothing dramatic happens, but for a few seconds the exchange stops being a transaction and becomes two people talking.

That distance has only grown as more service happens without a counter at all. A driver drops a package on the porch and is gone before the door opens. An order arrives already paid for, tracked by a first name on an app that vanishes the moment the transaction ends. It’s possible now to be served by dozens of people in a week and interact with almost none of them as people, because the entire design of the system is built to remove the friction of having to. Efficiency isn’t the enemy here. But that convenience makes it easier than ever to forget the human effort involved in getting the box to the porch on time.

The person behind the register has a life that continues after we leave, though we don’t need to know the particulars to grant ordinary consideration. The cashier shouldn’t have to be caring for a sick parent, the server putting himself through college, or the custodian supporting grandchildren before we decide not to treat them badly. Perhaps nothing dramatic is happening in any of their lives. They still deserve respect on an ordinary Tuesday when absolutely nothing is wrong.

Most of the people we encounter briefly will remain strangers. There is no need to inflate thirty seconds into a meaningful relationship, and no reason to erase the human being because the transaction is brief.

I’ve watched this pass between generations more than once, usually without anyone meaning to teach anything at all. A child who watches an adult thank the person clearing the table, by name, learns something no lecture about respect could really deliver in the same way. A child who watches an adult snap at someone behind a counter over a mistake that wasn’t that person’s fault learns something too, just not the lesson anyone intended to teach.

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from spending eight hours as a role rather than a person, and most people who work behind a counter know it well. It isn’t the standing, though the standing doesn’t help. It’s the accumulated weight of being spoken past, addressed by function instead of name, treated as an extension of a computer system that made the mistake somebody is now unhappy about. A single customer who looks up and reads the tag doesn’t undo a difficult shift. It’s a small thing. Most of what constitutes ordinary decency is.

For the length of a transaction, it is enough to remember there is a person on the other side of it.

Her name was right there on the tag. I may never see her again, and she certainly had no reason to remember me. That was fine. The name had already done its job. For a moment, it made it harder to mistake the uniform for the person wearing it.