andave's place

Here's to you all. Thanks for commenting on part 1. He's fun, isn't he? I was very bummed when he retired.


TAGGED OUT by Ray Orrock.
"As part of this job, I frequently attend press parties or preview gatherings or things of that sort, where you walk up to a long table at which two goodlooking young women, usually named Debbie and Rene, are seated.
The first thing Debbie and Rene do is to get your name and the name of the newspaper you work for, then check it against the R.S.V.P. list to make sure you aren’t some seedy type pretending to be a glamorous journalist.
Once that has been established, the second thing they do is to give you a little paper rectangle with something resembling your name printed on it. Mine usually reads ROY ORRICK. This is your name tag, and when you have peeled off the waxed-paper strips on the back and stuck the name tag to the lapel of your coat, you are ready to walk on in and join all the other people wearing names tags.

I’m not sure when the name tag was invented, but there was a time in this country when people attending a convention didn’t wear any sort of exterior identification at all. I don’t know how they handled that. Maybe they all just stood around by themselves, with a drink in their hand, wondering who everybody else was. But perhaps they developed a facility for remembering names and faces, and could walk right up to some guy they’d seen at a convention three years ago and call him by his first name. Or maybe they didn’t know anyone’s name, but whenever they saw a familiar face walked over and said something like “Hello there, you old (bleep bleep)!” as many people still do today. Since I have a terrible memory for names and faces—even the names of people I’ve just been introduced to—you’d think I’d be grateful for name tags. But I’m not. There are a lot of things about name tags that bother me.

I suppose the thing that bothers me most about them is now there’s no excuse for not knowing the name of the person you’re talking to at one of these social uprisings. But to learn that person’s name, you have to get a good look at their name tag, and most of the printing on those things is done by typewriter and is too small to read easily. This means you have to bend down and squint at their name tag, and—for some reason—none of us wants to get caught doing this. We all want to give the impression that we knew the other person’s name all along. That doesn’t make any sense, of course, but we all seem to be caught up in that game, and each of us has his or her own peeking method.

My own system is to get up as close as possibly to the other person, look him or her squarely in the eye, and then wait for our eyes to unlock. As soon as that person looks away, even for a moment, I swiftly bend down, try to read the name on the tag and straighten up again before our eyes relock. Sometimes they turn back and catch me before I’ve finished reading the tag, and that always leaves me feeling embarrassed. This is bad enough with a man, but even worse if the other is a woman, particularly if she’s a busty type. When she turns back unexpectedly and finds me bending down staring at her chest, I always feel like some kind of pervert.

The other thing that bothers me about today’s name tags is that they’re easy to forget. Not the name – the tag. The old name tags used to consist of a little plastic window, into which your name card was inserted, backed by a large brass pin. You pinned this thing to your lapel, and all evening long it flipped and flopped against your coat, constantly reminding you that it was there. But these new ones with the stickum on the back are light, inert, and lie flat against your lapel, so that it’s very easy to forget that you’re wearing one—even when the party’s over.

One time I left a press party in San Francisco and caught BART back to the East Bay. As I rode along the train car, I gradually became aware that the other passengers kept staring at me curiously. I began checking my clothing, looking for something torn or unzipped, and in the midst of this inventory discovered that I was still wearing my name tag. I felt like a total idiot. Somebody who sits in a BART car, wearing on his coat a piece of paper that proclaims HELLO! MY NAME IS ROY ORRICK can only be viewed as a pathetically lonely man who has taken to riding train cars in a desperate search for companionship.

Sometimes at one of those parties, when I’ve been caught several times bending down and staring at women’s chests, I’ve had the uneasy feeling that maybe the word is beginning to go around the gathering that there’s a sex fiend loose on the premises. Even after I’ve left the party, I find myself wondering if the men might have gotten together and said something like, “All right! We all know that there was a sicko here tonight mentally undressing our womenfolk. I say we get a rope, find the cad, and string him up.”
I’ve worried about that—but never very much.
If that posse ever does get organized, they’ll all be looking out for some guy named ROY."



(oh, and this has nothing at all to do with mtpspur's blog entry a couple entries back...nothing at all... )