Turn that smile upside down

"Where is your smile?...The stupid, idiotic smile everyone else seems to be wearing!"
--Kor, from the Star Trek episode "Errand of Mercy"

Though I have not read the book itself, I was delighted to come across this review of Barbara Ehrenreich's recent book Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World. Like the reviewer, I found it intensely refreshing, even liberating, to know that someone finally had the guts to take a swipe at a fraudulent concept that has built a phony-baloney multi-billion-dollar industry and duped far too many people into believing that all life's problems are best solved just by wishing real hard and grinning a lot.

Years ago, when I was chef at the Saint Louis Art Museum, we endured a brief period where we were beset by a goofy Napleon-complex manager who never tired of making the claim that "it takes twelve more muscles in your face to frown than to smile." Whether that's true or not (I'm sure it's not), it was his standard admonishment to everyone and his way of trying to enforce the fascism of phony good cheer on everyone. In a restaurant situation like that, service personnel who are any good at their jobs at all will automatically adopt a reasonably pleasant and good-natured demeanor, including smiling, when approaching customers, but this dude never let up on his dimwitted  theme under any circumstances. I could be sitting in the back office entering inventory data into my computer and be criticized for not smiling while doing that. Why so glum? What's the matter with you? And so on. To not be deliberately forcing a broad smile at all times automatically meant that there was some kind of problem, and that the problem was my fault, and that I was an asshole for having the problem, and I should fucking fix it by smiling. 

 

This sort of nonsense seems to permeate a lot of workplaces, which is one of the many reasons why am I unsuited to having a day job and need to get fully self-employed again ASAP. At my current job, there was an incident which is what set me off writing this post in the first place. Every other Friday, an "in-service" meeting is held. Attendance is mandatory. Though I do not attend anyway unless I happen to scheduled for work on that Friday. I was there last Friday, and part of the purpose of the meeting was to watch the video Fish! If you don't know what Fish! is, maybe you have a spare few hundred dollars to buy a copy or maybe you, too, work for a douchey company that will show it to you as a "motivational" training tool. It's a short film about the Pike Place fish market in Seattle and how they turned around a failing business by adjusting their attitudes and starting to have fun at work. Easy, right?  I can see why my boss found this appealing, because he seems like someone who, by nature, would very much like to incorporate a lot of yelling, shouting, cheering, hooting, hollering, throwing objects, and jumping around like a giggling jackass at work all day. Sadly, the fun-loving culture of the fish crew cannot be transplanted into just any work environment (least of all ours). Indeed, one of the fish crew members says during the video something to the effect of, "If you just try to copy us, then it won't work." But watching that video is not actually what pissed me off during this in-service. What pissed me off was the fact that the boss, during his lengthy intro to the film, was throwing pieces of candy at us. So throughout the meeting, it was necessary to constantly catch pieces of candy or be hit in the head with them. And we had to smile the whole time, too, or be called out for not smiling enough. 

Ok here's the deal: fuck that. As a fully grown adult, I don't find candy to even be appropriate as an item in the room during a work-related meeting, and having it thrown at me is just about the last thing in the world that is going to make me smile. While I do like there to be a positive, pleasant atmosphere of cooperation and conviviality in a work place, I do not enjoy juvenile behavior, particularly not from people even older than I am. It doesn't make me smile. I am not even going to pretend it makes me smile. I am not going to wear a fake smile at work because someone is bugging me about it all the time. And you know what else? Just changing one's attitude does not always (or even usually) fix problems: you actually have to do something about them sometimes. So if things aren't going well at work or in life, it's probably not actually caused by you because you didn't smile enough or wish hard enough for good things. But it might require some actual work to fix it. Amazing how doing something sometimes gets a result.