KILLING ME WITH KINDNESS

A love-thy-stranger epidemic has reached our shores and it’s killing me with its kindness.

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I’m slowly being poisoned by terms of endearment thrown out randomly and carelessly by sales assistants everywhere. I’m not half way in a shop before I hear “Hi, love” or “Do you need any help, sweetie?”

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“Hello,” would be enough. “Welcome,” would be plenty. “How are you?” would suffice, even with its oddness in rarely demanding a reply.

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When a sales assistant first called me “darl” it was in an Australian accent and I thought she had called me a doll. It struck me as so unusual that I replied with genuine enquiry, “Excuse me?” There was a pause and I realised she didn’t get what I was asking, so:

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“Doll?” I asked.

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“Darl,” she replied. “As in darling.”

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I was stumped. Was I upset at being called something only my husband called me, and probably after I’d done something nice like got him a beer from the fridge? I don’t think so. Did I think I should introduce myself to her so she could call me by my real name rather than the sickly darl? Possibly.

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“Everyone says it to everyone here,” she said, using the one of the world’s weakest excuses to cover the shenanigans of the majority. If everyone’s at it, it must be okay, right?

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Well no, dear sweet sales assistant, no my lovely, no.

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That first “darl” was 12 years ago in the city of Melbourne and they have been few and far between.

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Except sometime in the last two years, this love-thy-stranger epidemic has reached our shores. It’s got past Customs and those cute airport sniffer dogs and is well entrenched in cities and towns throughout our country.

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Contagious, noxious, a useless weed that needs killing.

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Here’s the list of endearments I’ve racked up just this year: darling (a Kiwi accent this time so I got that one right away), love, lovey, honey, sweet, sweets, sweetheart, sweetie. Wait, I spot a theme and alas, none of it do I find sweet.

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Maybe growing older has made me more intolerant, though I’d hoped the opposite was true. Maybe my hackles have been raised by my own prickly tendencies and I just need to shut up and shop.

However, I’ve conducted my own thoroughly unscientific survey (apologies friends, family and those random people I accosted in shops and cafes) and I know I’m not alone.

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My poll concludes that all of my friends and family, most of the strangers and half of my two teenage daughters do not like  being called anything other than “awesome” by sales assistants. If you are a sales assistant and you really want to assist your sales, you need to drop the honey, the love, the sweetie.

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It’s most common in common shops. I’ve only once heard it somewhere posh – at lunch at the Hilton, when a waitress was throwing “darling” around like free water. My hero (middle-aged woman on another table, I adore you) politely but firmly said “Please don’t call me darling.”

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And from the stunned waitress: “I’m so sorry.”

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I’ve spent too much time thinking about why sales assistants do it and I’ve yet to come up with an adequate answer. Is it a sloppy attempt at establishing rapport? It feels patronising. It’s definitely unprofessional. It’s meaningless, like the Kiwi idiosyncrasy of adding “aye” to the end of sentences.

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Sometimes it’s irked me so much that I’ve been put off shopping and walked out of the shop (okay, written down that does looks priggish). Other times I’ve spent way too much time browsing aimlessly through racks of clothes having a conversation in my head about how best to reply after being called “love”.

I think me and my dear hackles need to spend more time shopping online, where there’s no GST and no name calling.

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Sweet, I say.