Habits
Here's a snippit of a phone conversation I had with a customer yesterday:
----------
Customer: Click the next button?
Me: Yes sir.
Customer: You don't have to call me sir.
Me: I'm sorry sir, I'm from Texas and I can't help it.
----------

It's true, I can't help it. I've spent 40 plus years saying sir and m'am and it takes an enormous amount of concentration to stop doing it. I wish I could ask my employer to just send me calls from the southern states, but it doesn't work that way. Well, I wouldn't mind keeping upstate NY - they seem to find the habit kind of cute. I guess I'm going to have to start thinking along the lines of this: Call from Georgia - I can be polite in the way I was taught to be polite. Call from Nebraska - time to put on my cranky hat. My only experience with this difference was when I worked at Wendys and we had a manager with years of experience who was from Pennsylvania and had just relocated to Texas. We were all shocked and appalled at how rude she was to the customers. Except that she wasn't being rude, she was just from Pennsylvania where things were different. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a book out there called "How to be Polite, the Northern Way" so I guess this is one more thing I'm going to have to learn by trial and error.