Now that all the kids but one, Mario, are out of the house, the empty nest makes a big noise and my wife is acutely feeling it. She wants to get out there and make herself useful, mostly for herself. Nothing in Durham or Raleigh offers anything like the film career she had in Los Angeles, but she wants to be productive. She interviewed for a number of part time retail positions at a very nice mall called Southpoint and finally settled on one of them. What she reports after two weeks on the job is interesting and a bit alarming.

She is being outrageously praised for doing things her and my generation would have found to be automatically sensible, but seems in short supply among many of today’s newer workers. For example, during one of the few lulls when there weren’t many customers in the store, she took it upon herself to restore in proper size order the various clothing items customers had returned willy nilly to the racks. When the manager saw that she had done this, she raved at how great a worker my wife was.

Huh? Doesn’t doing what she did common sense as part of the job?

In another instance, she was praised lavishly for what she thought was simple problem solving. The store’s policy is to have the clothes customers select to try on waiting for them in the changing rooms. Saturday was particularly busy and my wife couldn’t remember the names of the many customers picking out clothes to try on. So she grabbed a pad of post-its and posted the customer’s name on the appropriate clothing item. The store manager couldn’t get over what a great idea that was. “My god,” said my wife about the manager’s reaction to her post-it solution, “you would have thought I had invented the wheel.”

Well, it seems that what she had devised was store procedure, but no one had told her about it. Instead, she “figured it out” herself and her several superiors were beside themselves with joy. Other compliments came her way for these actions and others that required only common sense. At this rate she’ll own the damned company in about two years. So what’s going on here? Are people dumber? Is the work force lazier? Is it a generational thing? Whatever, we’ve come to a sorry pass when praise is heaped upon someone simply for paying attention to her job and, ohmigawd, actually thinking about it.