Save me from the cult of instant intimacy

The other day I made a couple of calls to a bank about a loan. After the usual jumping over hoops to get to talk to a human being — the failure of voice-activated systems to understand a word I say, even when it’s the word ‘loan’, is particularly wounding — I got through to a young man who passed me on to a young woman. In both cases the answer to my actual query was no; they ended the call with ‘Have a good one’ and ‘You take care now’. To which all you can say, a bit lamely, is: ‘You too!’

Whenever someone tells me to have a good day, I recall the gag about the man who invariably stiffened slightly and replied: ‘Thank you — I have other plans.’ If it’s kindly meant, it’s fine; if it’s reflexive, just an automatic verbal sign-off, you wonder what’s going on. And what seems to be going on is an unease with formality, a flight from the norms of genuine social distance: in short, the universal cult of niceness.

Normally, you’d expect actually to know someone before you tell them to have a good weekend and personally I never tell anyone to ‘Take care’. But now we cut out the intermediate stages of an acquaintance and go straight to informality. In some cases the familiarity of the diction is the opposite of the substance: if you’re telling a complete stranger they can’t have a loan or that their home is going to be repossessed, then signing off with ‘Cheers’ or ‘Have a good one’ is weird. If you’re writing to say so, ‘Dear Madam’ hits the spot, not ‘Hi Melanie’, which is the new normal for a business email.