In mid-2021, I was employed at one of the big five Canadian banks as a Customer Service Representative. One morning, myself and the rest of the branch’s frontline staff (the tellers) received a notice from Management:

“There was a great idea that came out of the Toronto market to help make banking personal as a loyalty play. Please see below image for inspiration and reply by the end of the day.”

The “inspiration” attached was a series of poster designs:

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“Welcome! It is my pleasure to serve you today. 

My name is ASHLEY. I have lived in 10 cities and 2 countries.”

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“Welcome! It is my pleasure to serve you today. 

My name is JEREMY. I play acoustic guitar.”

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“Welcome! It is my pleasure to serve you today. 

My name is MAYA. I love to canoe.”

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And so on. The purpose of these graphics, which Management printed out on 8.5x11 paper and taped to the plexiglass germ-barriers on our desks, was ostensibly to endear the frontline staff to our customers, illustrating through personal tidbits that we were, in fact, real human beings who led our own little lives while we weren’t on the clock. This would in turn foster a personal connection between the customer and our bank, leading to a strengthened brand loyalty and continued business. 

It’s difficult to pin down exactly why I found this memo so particularly revolting, but let me try.

Having been employed in customer service for roughly a third of my life, I feel as though I’m accustomed to the little acts of phoniness that come with the line of work. I can put on a cheery affectation with exaggerated inflections to feign abundant enthusiasm for new products. I can maintain a bright-eyed yet gentle smile while a 74 year old woman berates me about how shitty our app is. When an item doesn’t scan and the customer asks if that means it’s free, I can even conjure a chuckle.

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In short, I know how to wear the mask.

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The practice of masking in the context of corporate customer service is ubiquitous to the point where it goes mostly unrecognized. Whether you’re selling insurance, serving drinks, or ringing up groceries, your employers don't want you to act exactly the same way at work as you do when you’re at home or out with your friends. They don’t ask you to lie per se, but to be genuine only so far as to facilitate a commercial interaction. Customers don't want to interact with stone-faced robots, but they also don't want their bank teller to overshare about their sex life, or spend 15 minutes making a case for why One Piece is worth the time investment. Just put on a friendly face, act like you’re happy to be here, and do your best to cover up the behaviour patterns that don’t line up with company values. In other words, they're only paying for the lite version of your personality.

On the flip side, customers are also aware of masking. Both parties, knowing that the interaction is taking place for purely commercial purposes, implicitly accept the mutual distance that exists between them. After all, isn’t there an odd comfort in the feeling that you’re basically two NPCs exchanging stock dialogue, without any pressure of exposing your true self to the world?

So that’s one easy explanation of why the little fun-fact-about-me poster was so deeply repellent to me: it constituted a small, yet meaningful breach in the arms-length social contract between myself and the customer—or more broadly—myself and the rest of the world. A crack in the mask.

For a while, I left it at that. Some people noticed the poster, a few commented on it, but most just ignored it. My day-to-day went unchanged, and if the posters did result in higher loyalty among our customer base I personally saw no evidence of the fact, nor would I stand to gain anything if it had. 

But hold on. If all that was true, why the fuck had I agreed to it in the first place?

There’s something else to be said for how transparent Management was in their language of the memo; they were trying to “make banking personal, as a loyalty play.” At the time, I remember thinking that there was surely a less slimy way to put that. “Loyalty endeavour”, “initiative”, or even “tactic.” But no, it was in every sense a play. They acted like they were getting one over on the customer, Inception-ing them into applying for another credit card by leveraging the information that I have a cat named Sullivan. 

It’s not just that the company was forcing me to let the mask slip; they were actively attempting to use my true face as nothing more than a sales tactic, commodifying aspects of my private identity to boost their profits in the same way that they’d hire an attractive spokesperson to appear in their marketing materials. I was being manipulated just as much as the customers. 

“They’re not even paying me any extra for this” I thought to myself, “Why would I volunteer pieces of myself to my employer for free?” Which implicitly carried an even more unsettling question: if they offered me a raise in exchange for being more genuine, would I take it? 

When we say that frontline service workers are the “face of a company” it’s easy to think of it as a shallow truism like a fast food restaurant calling its staff a "family", but I'd argue that the truth is quite a bit more literal. A multibillion dollar company has no identity or any tangible self of its own, and therefore no means with which to directly interface with consumers (Imagine the eldritch horror of interacting with the true bodily manifestations of Wal-Mart or Apple). The nature of a corporate economy necessitates the use of a proxy, some barrier that exists between the legal entity of The Company and the person who wants to buy a hamburger.

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In other words, it needs a mask.

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In a way, customer service can be thought of as masking on a macroscopic scale. A company which exists to generate billions of dollars for the benefit of a small group of stakeholders can’t “be itself in public” so to speak. The disregard for human dignity displayed in an executive earnings call would be unacceptable in the eyes of the average person, so the company has to hide all that behind a veneer of grounded personability that a customer can understand, even empathize with (see also: brand Twitter account sadposting). Looking at it from this bizarre profit-motivated angle, the company’s thought process almost makes a gross kind of sense:

“We want to be seen as relatable, and what’s more relatable than a real person?”

It seems that somewhere during my years of customer service, I’d made an implicit agreement: for $15.50/hr I could abide acting as a living mask, provided that I always had the option of hiding my true self behind a mask of my own, one made of practised laughs and artificial geniality. The little poster demonstrated just how much weight that stipulation was carrying; the moment I was obligated to reveal true information about myself to the countless strangers with whom I interacted on a daily basis, the entire facade fell apart. I was no longer selling a performance for minimum wage, but the real thing.

At some point during this (purely internal) meltdown of mine, I had to take a step back and ask: is it at all normal to be thinking this way? None of my coworkers seemed to share my aversion to sharing their life with the customers at the behest of the company, in fact some went out of their way to steer interactions towards the topic mentioned on their poster. So am I just irrationally protective about my identity? Is it some kind of generational thing that makes my generation more wary of corporatist exploitation? 

Soon enough, I took down the poster and management didn’t seem to care. My on-the-job behaviour didn’t change much either, but the experience had shifted my perspective: my mask could imitate humour, but not an ounce of wit; it smiled, but wasn’t ever that happy; it showed concern, but was never really concerned; I never ever mentioned my life outside of work, to the point where it may have seemed like I had none at all. 

If the company would use me as a mask, I in return would shape my mask in the image of the company.