How to Be Useful: A Beginner's Guide to Not Hating Work

by Megan Hustad

  When he recounted this story, he was laughing, but it clearly annoyed him. It wasn’t that they’d treated the elevator like a bar —and seemed to believe it their duty as impossibly attractive young women to be aloof and standoffish. It wasn’t their ambitious daydreaming—nothing wrong with that, though something in their tone suggested they thought getting a plummy job required the same strategic process they’d use to get something off a high shelf. (Rather than climb a ladder, they’d point from the floor and ask someone to get it down for them.) Time would take care of that attitude soon enough, the executive thought, but then added, “Call me old-fashioned, but I wasn’t like that growing up. That way of thinking, talking… it’s completely foreign to me.” As he saw it, the whole exchange amounted to piss-poor manners.

  Hearing about incidents like this makes me think Post’s Etiquette is worth revisiting. Not only would Post’s ears have pricked up at the obvious faux pas, but she could have patiently explained to the elevator girls why they should consider not saying anything beyond “Hello” in those situations. The problem—1922 and now—is that people don’t always realize they’re being obnoxious. Then they suffer the effects of their obnoxiousness without ever knowing they were the cause. It’s a particular problem in the “extraordinary modem world which is half-social, half-professional,” as The New Yorker described Post’s milieu. Ours is much the same. Your fate depends in a small but crucial way on whether someone wouldn’t mind having to sit next to you at lunch.

  After seeing more than a few fresh faces blunder—badly —through attempts to endear themselves to their new colleagues, it also occurred to me that imagining oneself nouveau riche might be a good way to approach conversation while new on the job. You = New Money. Everybody else who was hired before you = Old Money. (I mean everybody, from chief operations officer to the mailroom supervisor.) There is no other way to know you’re sharing an elevator with the only man in the company who has the authority—and after hearing you natter on for a while, the sincere desire—to fire you on the spot.

  The first way New Money got a foothold in society, according to Post, was to demonstrate familiarity with basic procedure. There were correct and incorrect ways of doing things, she believed, and which was which had been determined over generations of trial and error. She starts the 692 pages of Etiquette with fourteen pages on Introductions. (“Mrs. Jones, may I present Mr. Smith?”) She flatters her audience by reminding them—as if it’s an issue in their day-to-day lives—of how to respond when introduced to the president of the United States, a king, a cardinal, and visiting foreign ambassadors.15 She moves on to acceptable Greetings. When she comes around to Conversation, Post gets more strident:

  Nearly all the faults or mistakes in conversation are caused by not thinking. For instance, a first rule for behavior in society is: “Try to do and say those things only which will be agreeable to others.” Yet how many people, who really know better, people who are perfectly capable of intelligent understanding if they didn’t let their brains remain asleep or locked tight, go night after night to dinner parties, day after day to other social gatherings, and absent-mindedly prate about this or that without ever taking the trouble to think what they are saying and to whom they are saying it!

  It was clearly a subject that riled her, but perhaps she felt keenly how much was at stake for New Money. She herself was about as firmly entrenched in the power elite as a girl born in 1873 Baltimore could be. Her parents raised her in Tuxedo Park (the country’s second country club and first gated community), and she went to the finishing school (Miss Graham’s). This all helped her snag a husband—at nineteen—who came from even older money, and a tony address in New York.16 Post knew precisely how stodgy Old Money was, and how loath they were to welcome outsiders. And perhaps most important for New Money to understand, she knew that Old Money had its unwritten codes, and standards were high: “Once in a while—a very long while—one meets a brilliant person whose talk is a delight; or still more rarely a wit who manipulates every ordinary topic with the agility of a sleight-of-hand performer, to the ever increasing rapture of his listeners,” but this was rare. The people who think they’re amusing always outnumber the people who truly are.

  Ever increasing rapture? Realistically, the most foolproof way to avoid obnoxiousness when you found yourself in the same reception room with Old Money was to say nothing. You’d hang back and just observe the proceedings for a while, otherwise you’d remind them why they didn’t like new people. Mrs. William Backhouse Astor Jr.—the woman who ran New York society in the Gilded Age—kept a list known by anyone who read the society pages as “the 400.” It was widely rumored that the number was chosen because only four hundred souls could physically fit in Mrs. Astor’s ballroom. But that wasn’t true—imposing a cap was the whole point. “If you go outside that number,” socialite henchman Ward McAllister said, “you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make others not at ease.” Finding reasons to exclude people, in other words, is what some people do for fun.17

  I’ve never met anyone who, Mean Girls-style, openly begrudged new hires, but I do know that every arrival changes the mood of the office a little. Even an underling has the ability to momentarily raise the temperature of an organization, if only because (like New Money to Old Money) he or she’s a vivid reminder that time marches on, and things change, and change is unpredictable. For those who have been working in a place for a while, it can be unsettling. This new person could be a force for good, could make no difference whatsoever—or this person could cause hitherto unknown suffering.

  Whatever their suspicions, most longtime employees do prefer that new arrivals put in some time before they start serving up opinions. This was made abundantly clear the time a marketing assistant, on just her fourth day in the office, was invited to sit in on a major meeting at the publishing company where I used to work. This meeting was held only twice a year, and was attended by about fifty people, half of whom flew in from far-flung parts of the country. Her invitation to join was a rarity—a privilege, really, to the extent that sitting in day-long meetings can be considered a privilege. Two hours into the proceedings, the boss was wrapping up one discussion and preparing to move on to the next, and glancing around, asked for any last thoughts, when an unfamiliar voice from the corner of the conference room made a suggestion about a book that was about to be published: Maybe the package wasn’t working? Maybe they should consider changing the title? The boss had no idea who this young woman was—or so I gathered from the “Who was that?” she hissed at me as everyone filed out of the room another hour later. The girl’s title suggestion hadn’t been ignored, but it was shot down without a terrific amount of regard for her feelings.

  Even if the marketing assistant’s idea had been a flash of raw genius (it wasn’t, unfortunately), I don’t think it would have received much more consideration. If she had given the situation a few minutes of thought, she might have realized these people had collectively devoted dozens of years to deliberating book titles, so perhaps her four-day-old insights weren’t quite as valuable as theirs. Post would have had her show some deference, because Old Money liked deference, and not speaking until spoken to was an easy way to show it. In any event, the scene left everyone feeling ill at ease. Not least, I suspect, the young woman herself.18 Two weeks later, she was spotted stuffing envelopes in the mailroom without her shoes on. The strange thing is, no one was surprised—it was as if she’d already signaled her intent to walk around on that nasty carpet barefoot.

  “The faults of commission are far more serious than those of omission,” Post tut-tutted. “Regrets are seldom for what you left unsaid.” So many dangers associated with opening your mouth, but you can’t keep it shut forever. You have to speak because you’re no Bob Cratchit. Post felt the only way New Money could do so and avoid obnoxiousness was by adhering to what she called “the need for reciprocity.” In theory, this meant mere curiosity. In practice, it meant asking a q
uestion for each and every question asked of you. Someone asks you how you’re doing, you express interest in how she’s doing. Someone asks you what you’re working on, you inquire as to what he’s working on. This give-and-take was polite, sure, but it also allowed a savvy newcomer to gather information. Asking questions was important because it both buoyed conversation and let you do some basic fact gathering. Here Post again gave a quick nod to the rare conversational wizard—“but the ordinary rest of us, if we would be thought sympathetic, intelligent, or agreeable, ‘go fishing.’ ”

  So how would Post rate the following exchange? Anne, a curator, described to me a typical evening at an industry party. She spots William, an old friend she could reliably expect to see at these functions, across the room. “I go up to him, I’m happy to see him, and standing next to him is the new kid in his office. Maybe twenty-two, but he had the air of someone who graduated a year early.” William introduces the two (“Anne, this is Matt, he’s our new…”) and promptly excuses himself to locate the restroom. To jumpstart the conversation, Anne asks, “So, how long have you been there?” Just two weeks, Matt mumbles. “Liking it so far?” Well, he was just getting his feet wet, you know, but on the whole, he was liking it. “Great. I know William is very happy there.” Silence. Matt says nothing more. So Anne continues, glances around, makes a remark about the room’s bordello-like red velvet wallpaper, and when that lands with a thud, she asks what kinds of things he’s been working on lately. Matt goes on at some length, comes to the end of his narration, bites his lip, and smiles wanly. Silence again. Anne nods, keeps nodding for a while, then says it was nice to meet him and makes her excuse to get away, because, as she later said, “He made me feel like one of those parents in The Graduate. As if… if he gave me the slightest opening, I’d start lecturing him on plastics.”

  It might not seem like a make-or-break moment—conversations that take place with a plastic cup of Pinot Grigio in hand rarely do. And it’s possible Matt truly wasn’t interested in Anne’s storied career. Post, however, would put a stop to that line of thought straightaway by stating, matter-of-factly, that Matt’s boredom was of no consequence. It was only Old Money’s evaluation of the conversation that mattered—that is to say, not his, not New Money’s. If you were a bore firmly entrenched in the power structure, then it mattered less that you kept missing your cue, or couldn’t run with a joke. You could drive listeners to hot tears of frustrated boredom and someone would still ask you round if your name ended in “III.” But if you were new to the scene, no one felt obligated to keep sending you invitations.

  The fishing approach touches on one of the potentially seedier elements of working your way into insider status. Newcomers may be unsettling, but they don’t have any of the shared knowledge that keeps a system humming, and that’s always reassuring to anyone threatened by their presence. All closed systems run not just on shared operational knowledge (how things are done, or where stuff is kept), but also on collective memory of all the characters who’ve ever passed through. Every organization is haunted, Post is saying. This means you’ll hear coworkers refer to Mr. Fascinating, who left the company four years ago, and as they do they’ll see him before them, as if it were yesterday, and remember how he clutched his vodka tonics, how he chuckled at the CEO’s jokes, and how he and the sales director dated for months, thinking no one noticed, before finally going public. They’ll recall how he’d lean far over the conference table while waiting to make a point, and that there was something aggressive and territorial about it, and come to think of it, some things you do remind them of him. These capsule histories of past employees become a form of currency—totally worthless in any other context, but extremely valuable within the four walls of the office building. I was once haunted by constant reference to “Rebecca,” my immediate predecessor at a job. Rebecca did this, my boss would say, or Rebecca would usually that. I feared I was losing to the memory of Rebecca until I flat-out asked the woman at the next desk how wonderful, truly, this Rebecca person was. Turns out Rebecca had quit in tears after three months and informed everyone she was applying to graduate school. Perhaps, my informant suggested, the boss simply kept mentioning Rebecca because she was his first direct report and only reference point.

  Of course, whenever you’re trying to gain a foothold in a group, details of a member’s life are worth knowing for their own sake. In another instance, I innocently typed up a dismissive reader’s report for a manuscript, stating something to the effect that I had a hard time caring about the troubles of a privileged Connecticut boarding school girl—and promptly handed it in to a boss who, lo and behold, had been a Connecticut boarding school girl.19

  Ignorance, unfortunately, doesn’t get you a free pass on that kind of obnoxiousness. (This is what Post would have said to my dismissive report: “She who says, That does not interest me,’ or That bores me,’ defines her own limitations.”) Going fishing beforehand might have worked better, and I might not even have needed to ask my boss about her background; someone else could have easily filled me in. But very few new arrivals —supposing they should avoid looking like they’ve had their nose pressed against the glass—express any curiosity about people ranked above them. It’s worth repeating because it’s so pervasive and yet so fundamentally limiting: few junior staffers express the necessary curiosity about more senior staff members. It’s almost as if they think they know the answers, so they don’t even bother asking. When I asked a reporter, someone I assumed was comfortable with asking questions, why this might be so, he suggested that it was probably just awkward shyness. He went on to say this was the main problem with shyness, at least shyness in adults: it’s very easily mistaken for lack of interest. In fact, the line between not reciprocating when someone asks you a question and saying outright that you aren’t interested in them is a line so fine as to be effectively negligible.

  Here’s where it might be helpful to divulge something from Post’s personal life, because if all you know is her clipped phrasing and finger wagging, you might get the wrong idea about Etiquette. Post began to write—fiction, mainly—when she found herself feeling stifled by her sheltered existence. (Think of Michelle Pfeiffer looking like she’s about to pass out all throughout Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of The Age of Innocence, and you’ve some idea why.) Her writing didn’t make her tremendously popular with the people she grew up with, however. “Whenever any of the Tuxedoites who had known Emily from girlhood remembered that she was now an author,” her son Edwin wrote decades later, “they were prone to inquire with a touch a whimsy, ‘Darling, how are you getting on with your writing?’ and not pause for a reply.” But Post carried on writing, and more urgently when her 1905 divorce left her with bills to pay. The senior Edwin Post had turned out to be an indifferent husband at best, and one day, over lunch, Emily was informed he’d been keeping a mistress—a showgirl—in an apartment across town. The person who told her this was a scandal sheet publisher trying to extort $500, assuming the family would want to keep the story out of the papers. They didn’t play along, and Post was publicly humiliated. The divorce made her a single, working mother—uncommon for her time, and all but unheard of in her social set. It’s a detail that adds unexpected resonance to lines like this, in a chapter of Etiquette she titled “One’s Position in the Community”:

  Life, whether social or business, is a bank in which you deposit certain funds of character, intellect and heart; or other funds of egotism, hard-heartedness and unconcern; or deposit—nothing! And the bank honors your deposit, and no more. In other words, you can draw nothing out but what you have put in. If your community is to give you admiration and honor, it is merely necessary to be admirable and honorable. The more you put in, the more will be paid out to you.

  And with this we are far from silverware and wrist-corsage territory. This led me to wonder if there was any way to recover from an initial failure to grasp curiosity’s importance. Could you bounce back from a beauty-editor-in-the-elevator mom
ent, in other words? Not sway the bigwig toward forgetting your spasm of obnoxiousness—because that’s beyond your control—but prompt him to take you seriously? The advice from Andrew Carnegie’s era suggested no; one strike and your corporate over-lords would move on to the next contestant. Post seems to be saying otherwise. For one, good manners on Old Money’s part meant they were obligated to try hard to keep an open mind about you. Second, if the point of etiquette was “instinctive consideration for the feelings of others,” it made no sense to impose a time limit on that open-mindedness. You can start expressing more curiosity about people at any moment, and people wouldn’t think you’d changed so much as grown up. “Most of us go through life mentally wrapped in the cotton wool of our own affairs,” Post ventured wistfully. Any exceptions to that general rule were bound to get favorably noticed.

  This marks the first point in American success literature where the naturally shy—and constitutionally feminine—are actually accorded an advantage. What better way to overcome shyness than to shift the burden of speech to the other person? What better way to do that than by asking the kinds of questions that keep that person talking? Shyness disappears, and in its place comes the gentle, breezy deference that Old Money feels they deserve. You get the information you need, and you make your presence felt.

  I did notice this once in another former colleague. It was not that Analena was physically prepossessing. (She was undeniably pretty, but in some industries, pretty twenty-four-year-olds materialize in cubicles overnight.) One day I commented on her ability to keep people’s eyes riveted to her face. She responded quite seriously. Well, Analena said, she only asked questions—one after another after another. An hour of conversation would pass, and though she had revealed next to nothing about her background (half-Danish, half-American), accomplishments (nothing especially trailblazing yet), or predilections (having affairs), her partner would walk away completely gratified. They would be happy merely for the opportunity to tell their own stories. And when she wasn’t in the room, and came up in conversation, they’d go out of their way to mention what an interesting person Analena was.