I'd tipped the young man once at security, thinking he'd probably leave us there, then tipped him 250% more on the elevator up from the tram to Concourse B. When he finally deposited us at our gate, I joked that I was glad I'd already taken care of his tip, but it left me vulnerable to the ill opinion of people watching now and not seeing me give him anything. "Let's pretend that I'm handing you your tip, okay?" I said. He laughed.
That was my old angst, as old as tipping and being sensitive to adverse cultural opinion if you don't.
My new angst had to do with the prospect of reaching down to remove my shoes. Was someone across the aisle going to jump on me and yell that there was a terrorist on board trying to light the fuse to his shoe bomb? Very slowly and deliberately, I untied and removed first one then the other of my shoes. No one jumped me, no one yelled. So far as I could tell, no one even noticed.
Of course, I'm not Arab and don't look Arab. Maybe that was it. Or was it simply that I'm old and gray, even less like the stereotype of someone who would immolate himself in order to kill a bunch of infidels? Or possibly even more likely, was everyone else tired too and maybe thinking they'd like to take off their own shoes?
Heck, probably no one back at the gate noticed me seeming to hand a tip to the young man who had pushed my wife's wheelchair.
Angsts old and angsts new may both be mostly our own private affair.
Great post! I've often pondered the very same question about how public (or not) many of our worries may be. Good food for thought about how powerful cultural opinion can be. In the classroom I teach in, there is no clock, so I usually keep track of time with the class laptop. On occasion, I don't need to set up the laptop for my lessons. Just the other day, I used my cell phone to check the time. I felt the need to announce that I was pulling my phone out to see how much time we had left. I usually find it rude when people text message during meetings/classes, etc., and I didn't want my class to think I was pulling out my phone to quickly read an incoming message. In reality, possibly nobody was thinking that, as many of them probably use their phones as timekeepers, as well.
ReplyDeleteI suppose there are many other situations where our angst over other people's interpretation of our actions is well founded. I guess the difficulty is knowing when and if it matters to be concerned what people think.
André, Very nice example. I think that most people, everyday, calculate continually how other people might react to, or what they might think about, what they're about to say or do. We are often hardly even aware that we're doing it.
ReplyDeleteWhile some of this calculation serves a useful cultural purpose, perhaps most of it just causes unnecessary anxiety. Certainly it often constrains us from acting creatively and more productively.
Your old and new angsts hit home, but I try not to worry so much as you about public opinion. I don’t think it’s healthy.
ReplyDeleteHa, I don't worry that much about public opinion, but for the sake of the post it was convenient to pretend that I worry more than I do. The second-thought about fiddling with my shoes was unavoidable, though, given the fact that I'd just gone through airport security and was therefore already thinking about terrorists, and the publicity around Richard Reid's failed attempt to detonate his shoe bomb was huge.
ReplyDeleteI was in Seattle yesterday and took a cab. When I arrived at my destination I realized I didn't know what % it is customary to tip a cabbie, so I asked him. I then proceeded to give him twice what he suggested!!! I was so tired from getting up three hours early to get there I couldn't think through the math. It made him VERY happy though.
ReplyDeleteI try not to worry too much about what others think of my actions. I have two quotes on that, one is from a book by Helen Fielding (she wrote bridget jones diary). I forget the name of the book, but one of the main characters "rules for living" included "No one is thinking about you, they're thinking about themselves, just like you."
and Ingrid Bergman: "I have no regrets, I wouldn't have lived my life the way I did if I was going to worry about what people were going to say."
Getting pounced on for taking off my shoes on an airplane would kind of Suck though.
BCIII never got the Bergman quote. :)