Sweetie

Sometimes at work, I'm southern.

It happened on accident at first. I had helped a Texan find a Morgan Freeman movie and she spent enough time talking to me at the circulation desk that I subconsciously internalized her speech patterns. This has happened to me before. I once listened to the Harry Potter series on cassette tape and I spent a week talking like I was from Northamptonshire. But at that time I didn't work in customer service so the only real victims were the members of my family. I guess it's true that you always hurt the ones you love.

Anyway. After the Texan left, I took the next person in line and they owed $65.20 in overdue fines. I told her how much she owed but because of the Texan when I spoke it came out sixty-fahv and I noticed that instead of getting mad, which this lady had been about to do, her face softened and she smiled. “Oh, of course. Hey, where are you from?”

I don't think well on my feet (or my butt, as the case was) and I said “Mesa” before I could consider the atypical nature of my fahv. She looked puzzled so I blurted out that my father is from Texas. This is mostly true, but I could just as truthfully say that my father is from Westminster, California or Chicago because he grew up all over the place.

“Oh, I just love your accent,” the lady told me, and she handed me her Visa card. I was so nonplussed by her change of demeanor that I didn't swipe her card fast enough the first time and I had to try again.

One of the only advantages to working with the taxpaying public is that there are myriad opportunities to perform sociological experiments. This is probably an ethical gray area but I decided last year that as long as I don't attempt to perform any statistical analyses or publish in the journal of the American Psychiatric Association, I'm in the clear. So after the Texas incident, I decided that when I interacted with customers I was going to speak with an accent.

There were objections. Not by any supervisors, because I never tell them when I'm collecting data, but from coworkers who are used to me talking like a character on an American sitcom. Three customers in on a Saturday morning, Brittany said, “Jill, that's creepy and you need to stop.” I made note of her objections in the Excel file I use to track the results of experiments I perform on coworkers and switched from East Texas to West Louisiana. After lunch I segued into rural Virginia.

I can't speak to the validity of my research methods but after seven days I seemed to get a better response from customers as a Dallas native. I also noticed that the accent was working on me; I provided better customer service when I spoke with a drawl. I tabled the accent as a full-time experiment but drop fahvs at least twice a shift and when I need to de-escalate a dispute with an unhappy customer.

At a county-wide staff training session last month we were asked for ideas on how to handle an angry patron and apparently I am the only person in the Maricopa County Library District who feels that “Pretend to be Southern” is an acceptable means of calming someone down.

The only problem with the accent is that it increased incidences of being addressed as “Sweetie” by about 320%.* I don't know if it's the hair or the cleavage but about one in three male customers will be unable to stop himself from calling me by a cutesy nickname, usually “Hon.” But I get “Sweetie” from both genders equally (approximately one in five customers) and when I am Southern, it's Sweetie This and Sweetie That and all of a sudden my smile doesn't quite reach my eyes and I will shank a B.

I realize that I've got epic hair and I'm probably showing too much supraclavicular soft tissue but I am a professional, dammit, and I would like to be treated with a little respect. Sweetie always feels demeaning and last year, around the same time I started using caffeine as a substitute for sleep, I had had enough.

The first thing I tried was to stop being nice to people at the desk. This was both convenient and acceptable because the thing about working for the government is that people expect you to treat them poorly. I was never rude but I was deliberately unhelpful for probably a solid week. I was your stereotypical stern librarian, which I hypothesized would result in more respect. Unfortunately I grossly underestimated the number of men who have librarian fetishes. The week culminated in someone's great-grandfather asking, “Do you want me to pay the fine, or do you want to spank me?”

Although on the upside, that same week I intimidated a little Mexican guy into calling me “Sir.” But it takes a lot of effort to be a jerk consistently and I didn't have the energy for it. I asked the internet what I could do to command more respect from the taxpayers of Maricopa County. Most of those things involved effort, too, and the other thing about working for the government is that people expect you to be lazy. I don't want to disappoint them, which is why I spend most of my working hours watching cat videos on YouTube and playing really juvenile pranks on my coworkers.

The laziest thing I could think to do was just to start calling people Sweetie back, and I have gotten away with it every single time. Not only have I gotten away with it but people have asked for my name and then e-mailed the branch manager telling her about that nice Jill who provided exemplary service.

The downside is that it's hard to break the Sweetie habit. A month after I started offering reciprocal Sweeties, my supervisor asked if I would shelve a cart of DVDs and I said, “Sure thing, Sweetie.” She didn't react, but when I called in sick the next day she did suggest that maybe I take the next day off too, because she was worried about me.

I compared her worry to the data from the rest of my experiment and I have decided that, in the interest of workplace harmony, the next time I call my supervisor Sweetie I need to do it with a southern accent.

*I got a B in research methods in college. I earned a C but fought my way up to a B using arguing skills I picked up in the logic class I took that semester.