When you wake up in the morning, do you smile while you are getting ready, or do you have serious face? When you go out, do you smile at other people in the early hours of the day, or do you show a face that shows how frustrated you are to see anyone else on this earth besides you? I meet and interact with almost around 50 people everyday and have some kind of a conversation with them. Some of them are friends, while others are people at different places like the grocery store where I went to buy something. I notice the way people smile; the different kinds of smiles, and the different kinds of people who are smiling.

When I go to the post office, many of the workers there don’t smile, and they carry a face that shows a ‘casual’ emotion. The post office has thousands of people coming in everyday, and since they’re a government agency, they don’t have to smile. Every time a postal worker smiles, it means that they’re smiling a genuine smile. Go to the DMV, and you will be lucky to find someone smile at you. Those people also deal with thousands of people everyday, and most of them from different areas of the society. Thus, the DMV employees are frustrated, have been for several years, can carry a serious or a rude face and attitude throughout the entire duration of your transaction with them. It might make you feel that the DMV wishes you were never born, but the reality is that they’re just used to people everyday and now they’re just dealing with it.

Go to a restaurant, and you’ll see the biggest number of ‘fake’ smiles that small tips can buy. The people will smile over anything; order something and they’ll smile. Say a stupid joke and they’ll smile. Tell them something about your car and they’ll smile. Tell them a sad fact [like someone died in your family] and they’ll wipe away that smile right away. Immediately tell a joke after the sad news and the fake smile will be back in front of you again. It’s as if money or keeping appearances has won over the emotions of the person serving us, and we’re paying them [through money or through a respectful conversation] to put on a show for us. It’s interesting, however, when we go to a restaurant and if our waiter [mine also, even though I used to be one] doesn’t smile at us, we think of it as bad service. Go to the gas station and the people working there, most of the time, are so busy serving you that they rarely look at your face. That’s completely normal, considering the work they have to do and that their customers don’t want an interaction but a fast service. A good interaction in such a case may actually frustrate the customer, as the customer just wants to get something like gas and leave.

Why are all these people smiling, or manipulating the smiles [faking it, or hiding it]? It’s not a big deal, you may say. I find it annoying when people I meet for the first time smile over nothing for the entire duration of the meeting and the smiling face and the face never changes even over a serious topic or when the actual happy emotion in that person has rusted away. I introduce myself and they already have a smile; that’s good. However, as we keep talking, that smile never changes, and that shows that it’s just in their nature to keep smiling, even when the real emotion of being happy to see someone new [or someone at all] isn’t there. It’s better to have a non-smiling face than a face that resembles the smiley from MSN Messenger [I hate most of smileys that come with that program; they're horrible and should be done away with]. Next time you work somewhere, try to smile both a genuine smile [by actually feeling happy over something] and the fake smile [by smiling because something depends on it, like a tip or your job or even your image]. You can easily see later in the day which one actually made you feel better later on.