Richard Gottlieb

Nice is nice again

Is being nice back in style?  Let me tell you a little story:

I was driving down I-84 when I came to a construction area. It's spring so that means lane closings, stopped traffic and angry drivers. As I struggled through the bottle neck and finally came to the end I noticed a New York State Highway Department sign that said: “Leaving Work Zone: Thank You for Your Patience.”

Now, I don’t know about you but I have never felt that any highway department (much less the New York highway department) anywhere in the world cared about how I felt. In what I actually was that they went out of their way to give me the message that they cared nothing about how I felt. 

This incident followed my being on hold with a credit card company for an extended period of time. When we finished, I politely thanked the customer service representative and he responded by saying: “No, thank you Mr. Gottlieb. You have been so patient.” 

“What was that all about,” I wondered, “a credit card company being nice?”

Well, the next day I found out. It seems, at least according to The New York Times, being nice is back in style. The article “Back by Popular Demand,” makes the case that there is a concerted effort by companies and institutions to be nice. As the article puts it: There is “…an outbreak of niceness across the cultural landscape — an attitude bubbling up in commercials, movies and even, to a degree, the normally not-nice blogosphere.”

As a blogger, I was interested in the one piece of data the article used to support the notion that there is a niceness epidemic. As the Times puts it: “There is no scientific niceness index. But what can it mean that use of the word “idiot” in blog posts has declined by nearly half in the last six months, according to BlogPulse, a Nielsen service that tracks online data?”

So why are people being kinder. One speculation for the outbreak in nice is that during bad times people become kinder. Makes sense to me.

At any rate, thank you for reading this blog…and have a good day.

Posted by Richard Gottlieb on May 29, 2009 | Comments (1)