“Make more eye contact,” Dick Marriott once told me after a sales call. Since then, I’ve been practicing the art. But, after Covid, people often avert their eyes when I encounter them. And their eyes are all I can see over their masks. Do they believe the virus can be transmitted eye-to-eye? Yet, I myself often need to be reminded that our eyes are the key to human understanding, “windows to our souls.” Like when I was driving my car and simultaneously trying to convince Gunnar Isaacson to accept a sales position. After failing to make headway, Gunnar exclaimed, “can we please stop somewhere and talk this over (eyeball to eyeball).” (I’m just an engineer, after-all, let me get back to my calculations!)
“Always address people by their name, it’s the most important sound they’ll ever hear,” Harold Jackson told me after he noticed my reluctance to do so. Harold had recently entrusted me to run his truss plant, and he was helping me get to know my people. He knew that reciting one’s name is the next best step after making eye contact to comradery. Since then, I’ve tried numerous memory aids to assist me, but the best one came surprisingly from our former head Geek (Software head), David McQuinn. Upon meeting someone for the first time, Dave always repeats a person’s name very clearly, almost phonetically, and would say it often while conversing with him. Repetition is the key to retention.
Looking straight at people and calling their name (or asking for it) are just two ways that can help bring us back to pre-Covid interrelations, with or without masks. No data suggests that fleeting human interactions can harm us. Fortunately, Americans aren’t prone to spontaneously embracing strangers or “getting in their faces.” Even in Florida, where some allege higher risk, I’ve been in close quarters among 1500+ tri-athletes on 3 occasions, without anyone endangering me. Yet, despite maintaining safe distances, I’ve met scores of wonderful people. In short, our formerly friendly nation has had a year to adjust to the pandemic, and there is no longer any excuse for averting our eyes from each other or failing to be courteous.
To receive attention from others is the most basic human need, and we urgently need to get back to providing it. We can’t do it on a Zoom call, but only face-to-face, even if wearing masks. As proven by the heavy toll that isolation has exacted upon our seniors, or upon students lacking in-person instruction, human interaction is essential. Just the fact that I can vividly recall the decades-old anecdotes recorded above tells me how much personal attention has meant to me. Certainly Dick Marriott was one of the very best in being attentive to others, having just been elected to the SBCA Hall of Fame long after his retirement. We owe it to our mentors, as well as each other, to recover the simple common courtesies that we may have neglected during the pandemic.