Business Men

There are at least two perfectly viable coffee shops within a five minute walk from my house…and that’s not including the one that’s a 30 second walk from my house. And yet, today I wanted something new and so I headed north into the New Orleans Central Business District to search for new terrain. It was a bad idea. I ended up at a PJs Coffee outlet (a local chain) that I haven’t been to since I first stumbled into it on a chilly January afternoon a year and a half ago when I was visiting the city to interview for my ill-fated job. I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it now. The reason is that it’s filled with Business Men.

I don’t like the business class. Let’s be clear on the specific delineation here -- I’m not talking about capitalists, or the rich, or the upper middle class, or yuppies, or conservatives. Although there is obviously a good deal of overlap between all of those categories and the business class (and although there is most certainly plenty to say about each of them as well), I am specifically talking about the genus of businesspeople and legal professionals who inhabit the office buildings of urban centers and who meet up at coffee shops to hash things out. I am not making an ethical or rational argument here. I’m just looking at them, and thinking about how I don’t like them.

I am talking about men with leatherbound portfolios with small pockets or straps for pens and things, and yellow pads or folders filled with essential documents. About what? About SOMETHING, for God’s sake, something important. These are men dressed along a spectrum – some with wingtips, some with sneakers; some in jeans and some in slacks – but nonetheless all neatly put together, all dressed for success. These are men with clean, hefty, hairy fingers engirded with a glinting wedding band or a garish class ring – just the right dollop of tacky sheen to lend a whisper of masculine sleaze to the well-groomedness. These are men who go to gyms. Some may commute by bike. These are men who continually fondle their technology devices, devices which are continually filtering down to the rest of us over time (cell phone, laptop, smart phone, etc) in the same pattern as the technology is adopted by them – at first as power totem and later as indispensable life support system.

These men are talking to each other and smiling. They are nodding their heads and lowering their voices. They know what they need to say, and they’re saying it. They have glistening, attentive eyes locked in steady contact with one another (“I am here in the moment; I am listening to you and I am intrigued with your proposed goods or services!”) as they lean purposefully forward over their small tables towards one another, discussing prospects. These men call the shots, or at least they act like they think they call the shots. There are no women in here, except for the baristas. But what are they, compared to Business Men?

One just bumped my chair quite violently as he walked past, talking on his phone! He didn’t apologize, and in the bumping process his glasses fell out of his trousers pocket unnoticed. I tracked him down and returned them, and he gave me a brusque “Thank you” without looking at me, then walked out the door. Imagine – a Business Man saying “Thank you” to a guy like me! (It actually was very exciting for me, because I got to really savor the self-righteous memory of my abused gallantry when I sat back down to write this.)

Men like this are easy to dislike and easy to mock. Men like this are convenient because they provide a foil for people like me, which is to say people who have done a bad job of establishing even the slightest semblance of personal financial security. I’m sure some of them are ok. I would even concede it’s possible that they possess the same basic ratio of “ok people” to “not ok people” as the rest of us, as I have often discovered this to be the case among various groups of people among whom I at first assumed the ratio would be higher or lower. What do you all think?