Marie understood that people said, “Hello, how are you?” without having to actually know the person they said it to.
She saw this happen many times in Macy’s and in Starbucks. She watched the barista start up a conversation this way with a customer when it was slow.
She watched the mannequin-like perfume lady in Macy’s say this to less mannequin-like customer with children. When addressed in this way, the strangers spoke, they were lifted up out of their day into a kind of friendly nodding recognition of one another.
But it didn’t work very well when Marie tried it. Almost all of the time when she said, “Hello, how are you?!” to strangers, they did something with their voices that made the answer, “Fine, thank you,” sound much more like, “I don’t know you; stop talking to me.”
Her Carson Center outreach worker explained to her that it wasn’t okay to stand directly in front of a person’s path when greeting someone this way (even though it was the best strategy for getting attention.) Her Carson helpers also described how it is that her excited voice sounds too much like an angry voice and that people don’t want to be asked those follow up personal questions such as, “Where are you going?”
Refraining from these kinds of greetings was part of Marie’s social skill lessons. There are a lot of skills to keep track of. For example, when you shake a hand, you should let go of it while talking (even though it feels like you are listening better if you hold it the whole time.) You should not tell people that you think they look like a movie star or that they look a whole lot fatter than the last time you saw them. People are very tricky to get right. It’s getting easier. Someday Marie would like to work at the Dollar Store. Once in awhile, Marie sees people with a certain smile on their certain kind of face. Even though she doesn’t know them, she breaks the rules and greets them because she knows when they answer, “Fine; thank you!” they make the words sound like, “Hello, Friend.” She knows her Carson worker would understand.
By JAC Patrissi
