or is it nice regards?
We’d just gotten back to Brooklyn — with a large pepperoni pie from Joe’s, because we’d already had dinner and maybe one too many post-dinner drinks at a trendy wine bar (I’m keeping this recommendation to myself, sorry y’all), and a trip to New York means we get to have as many dinners as we want — and we were slow getting out of the Lyft. Mid-conversation, pizza box needing both hands, a little wine-tipsy, neither of us in a rush to be the first to get to the door.
A guy leaving the building exited from the swinging doors instead of the revolving one we were “supposed to” use. He yelled, “YO. Hurry up. I’m holding the door FOR YOU.” In a Brooklyn accent.
We hadn’t asked. We weren’t even in the “is someone close enough to hold the door for them” zone yet. He just saw two people heading his way with a pizza box the size of a manhole cover and yelled anyway.
None of this registered as rude. He may have yelled at us, or rather, in our direction, but I wasn’t offended. I found it refreshing. I think I’m a little homesick. I miss the hell out of the city.
This is the “New Yorkers are kind but not nice, and Californians are nice but not kind” thing people love to say. Nice is a performance for the room. It’s the smile, the “have a good one,” the held door where you’re thanked and thank them back and everyone feels good. Nice is the customer service voice. Nice is the sales version of me.
I got a dose of “nice but not necessarily kind” during every post-layoff period. So many people said the same eight words — “let me know if you need anything!” — and meant them, I think, in the moment they typed them. But they didn’t specify what “anything” was allowed to be. And when I actually took a few of them up on it — hey, could you take a look at my resume, do you know anyone hiring, can you introduce me to this person — some of them just went quiet.
The people who actually did something didn’t ask first. A few of them wrote me LinkedIn recommendations without me requesting it. Others forwarded a job posting with “this made me think of you” and nothing else. But they were few and far between, way fewer than the “I’m so sorry! Let me know if there’s anything I can do!” messages.
When my dad died, it wasn’t the people with the nicest condolence texts who I remember the most — it’s the friends who organized meal deliveries for me from a local Denver restaurant group even though they lived in New York, and didn’t make me talk about it if I didn’t want to.
None of that was nice, exactly. I think nice would’ve waited to be asked.
We got back to our Brooklyn apartment, had a few slices of pizza while settling in for the evening with the latest episode of Ted Lasso, and I thought about that interaction that happened right outside. He held the door for two strangers and expressed his own irritation about it in real time, and I found that sincere and incredibly New York.
Nice offers and doesn’t follow through. Kind just does.
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