A curious thing has been happening to me lately, and maybe you’ve experienced it too. The last few times I’ve been in the grocery or pharmacy checkout lane I have been confronted with bubbly and effusive young people who, after the transaction is completed and they’re bagging my purchases, have advised me to “have an awesome day.” They will occasionally, if they are of the young-girl variety of retail clerk, add that ubiquitous teenage adverb “totally” into the mix. I would like to know who upped the ante on a common phrase without informing me?
I have to disclose to you here that I need to muster all of my strength of being just to have a nice day. I don’t need the kind of pressure it takes to have an “awesome day.” When this is said to me it always gives me pause. It would be nice, actually, every once in a while, to have a great day instead of just a nice day, but the chances of me having an “awesome” day are too narrow for even the most adept mathematician to calculate. I am not sure, even in our advanced technological society, if the instrument has yet been created that could measure the odds of me having the kind of day these young people wish upon me.
Oh, don’t worry — curmudgeon that I am, I do not take the luster of promise away from these youngsters. I just nod and smile. They generally seem to offer the phrase in earnest and not as some trite way of saying “goodbye.” To be sure, they seem genuinely capable of the feat themselves. They probably have awesome days all the time. And, at 17 or 18, why not?
I am of an age, 53, when all of my awesome days are behind me. Here are these seemingly bright young people scanning and bagging my high-fiber this and reduced-calorie that, completely oblivious to and unaware of the days that lie ahead of them when limiting calories and increasing fiber will become an imperative. What lies behind those slack-jawed expressions? Are they wondering in what awkward fashion to ask Ashley to the prom? Or whether or not Josh, like, totally meant it when he said, like, he liked me? If they would just pay attention to the pathetic array of products I have placed before them they might temper their wishes with more realistic adjectives. “I hope your day is bearable,” they might say, or, “Have a satisfactory day.”
“I hope you get by OK today” is more my current speed.
I’m really not complaining, though it may appear so, but I am curious as to how these colloquialisms get started and then, once begun, how they get ratcheted up without my knowledge. I can remember when sales clerks and cashiers merely said, “Thank you” and “Goodbye.” “Have a nice day” may have started organically and spread by word-of-mouth, or it may have been minted in a corporate customer-relations office somewhere; I’m not exactly sure. Likewise, the process that pleasantries and niceties have to undergo in order to reel and spin completely out of control and enter the realm of the banal is beyond my ken.
Who decides when and how these phrases get escalated to the point where they not only become trite but damn near impossible to accomplish? To have an awesome day becomes a dare, a challenge. How presumptuous it is to put a complete stranger under that kind of onus. I don’t even make that level of demand on my own family. Yet, here are people who have only made my acquaintance for a few seconds and who already feel comfortable enough in my company to obligate me to a commitment that I do not ask of my wife and sons.
Someone should be held accountable when polite expressions careen out of control. At the very least, I wish the forces that be would consult with me before choosing when the next bit of banter will unjustly and unfairly cross the line to where it no longer is bound by the realm of the possible and enters into an otherworldly aura of the unattainable — at best. At worst it becomes a command with which, frankly, I cannot comply.
Anyway, that’s considerably more than my two cents on the subject. I hope you will think about it the next time you bid adieu to a customer, client or otherwise short-term acquaintance. And, since I’m already speaking French: Avoir un jour agreable.
