I’m The Kind of Guy That Laughs at a Funeral…

I’ll thank the Barenaked Ladies upfront for the borrowed song lyric. The song it’s borrowed from came out in 1998. I connected with the line then, though it would take a few years before I’d realize just how poignant it really was.

I don’t really know what (if any) meaning the Ladies of Barenakedness wanted this line to carry, but I’ll tell you why it matters enough to me to blog about it. Laughter, or smiling in general, have always kind of been a default reaction for me. This is especially true in uncomfortable, or difficult situations. It’s a very hard thing to explain, made tougher by the fact that I’m just as prone to cry when someone around me cries. Feelings are weird man.

But yes, there have been many times in my life when I have had to consciously force myself to ‘not smile’. And even that hasn’t always worked. Sometimes it just happens in the moment. I’m actually trying to listen, learn, or deescalate in a moment of uncomfortableness, and the whole time, not realizing it, I’m smiling.

The most frequent trigger of this behavior is when dealing with an unhappy customer. For much of my adult life, I’ve worked in some form of restaurant and retail management. Inevitably, I’d deal with customers whose visit hadn’t been what they were expecting. A great deal of the time it was our oops, and in these situations I didn’t even have to think about the whole smiling thing. I would turn it off as I looked for a way to fix the issue. There were times however when the customer wasn’t exactly being genuine, or reasonable. In these moments, I had to turn the anti-smile up to an 11.

Okay, to those of you scolding me for questioning the integrity of a customer, I’ll just assume that you, yourself have never worked in retail. Or at least not for any meaningful amount of time. I’m sure several of you rolled your eyes and thought of 894 examples of times you had the same kind of encounter back when you were working at Burger King, or Walmart.

The easiest example of this that I can quickly relate comes from my time working for a national pizza delivery chain. I was working as a shift runner at the time. A man came into the store furious. He had ordered a pizza then waited over an hour with no pizza arriving. He had tried calling the store numerous times, and no one had answered. The man was staying at a hotel not far from the store, and the whole thing had made him so irate that he came down to give us a piece of his mind. He actually gave me several pieces of his mind before I had a chance to respond.

I started out apologetic. The store did have an aging phone system (in 1996 that is saying something) and while I didn’t personally remember taking an order from the hotel, it didn’t mean that someone else hadn’t. I offered to make him a pizza right then and there, which I did. I then tried to offer him a drink. He said he didn’t want a drink, he wanted his money back. Now this gave me pause. I asked him if he hadn’t yet received his pizza, then how had he already paid for it? He somehow got more mad and called me a couple of names before demanding to see my manager. I informed him I was the only management level person on staff at that time, and then asked again how he had paid for his pizza. He turned red and said “With my credit card!”

Well boys and girls, here’s where we had a problem. This being 1996, and the owner of my store being somewhat thrifty, we didn’t actually accept credit cards. The smile that stretched across my face was likely absurd looking, but at that point I wasn’t worried about not offending this man. I informed him that we didn’t accept credit cards as a payment, but did let him know which pizza delivery place in town did.

Shockingly he didn’t say anything. He just turned and stomped out the door. I later ate some of the pizza I had made him. Unlike revenge, this dish was best served piping hot, and was, quite enjoyable as I recall.

This post could probably do double duty as one of my stories, and I’ll tell you straight up that I do have a few restaurant and retail nightmare stories that I will probably share over there at some point. This topic of discussion ends up in the blog pile for a couple of reasons though.

The first being that I suspect I’m not alone when it comes to the smiling at funerals line. I’ve spoken with several people that have a similar reaction to uncomfortable or bad situations. When I call it a defense mechanism, I’m not saying that flippantly. I really do smile and even laugh on occasion when I’m presented with sad or troubling news. When it’s news just for me, then it doesn’t bother me. When it’s something happening to someone else, then the anxiety only makes the controlling of my facial expressions that much harder.

Secondly, it’s a good place to remind us all that we have no idea what is going through someone else’s head. When we don’t get the reaction we are expecting, we shouldn’t become irate, or otherwise upset with the person. Everybody deals with trauma in different ways, especially when it’s the trauma of someone close to them. I don’t see that as a bad thing, I see it as a human thing.