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Mark Read is the CEO of WPP, the global advertising energy, and now that he’s seeing customers again in an increasingly vaccinated business world, he shakes their hands happily.
“With people I don’t know, it’s an icebreaker,” he told me last week. “The elbow is gone, definitely for me.”
Sir Douglas Flint, chairman of the newly renamed Abrdn asset manager, has a more vigilant plan of attack for this new unstable phase of Covid conduct.
“I sure don’t go into a room and I have a hand,” he says. Instead, stop and wait to see what people prefer. “Let them make the first move and go in a nanosecond behind them.”
After several days of deeply unscientific surveys, I have no idea which of these two greeting strategies is more common. But I can report that it is certainly a problem.
The uneven state of the vaccines, in addition to very divergent views on the appearance of safe behavior, has divided us into an awkward mix of shakers, bumpers and punches.
The results, unfortunately, can be disastrous. A German-based man working with a friend of mine in London had a particularly brutal time during last month’s England vs. Scotland match at the Euros football tournament.
As he wrote to my friend, “I met some new friends at a bar. Everyone was punching me, so I did the same. Then another came in. I stretched my fist and he took a handshake.
Neither of them reacted quickly enough and the hand shaker turned out to be a good long shake. “So we stayed there for an extremely long time, he just held on and shook my protruding arm stump like a ball and a joint.”
Improper collisions between punches and shaking hands are not limited to Germany. From Sydney to San Diego, I’m told that mundane opening tastes are turning a painful game of scissors-paper-rock.
Things seem especially serious in the United States, where nearly 70% of adults have received at least one Covid shot. 57 percent of Republicans believe the pandemic is over, compared to only 4% of Democrats.
A London-based American friend who had just returned from a trip to both coasts of the United States was surprised to find handshakes and even hugs.
“There was a kind of repressed desire to get things back to where they were before,” he said. It’s okay if you’re one of the most vaccinated, but not if you’re among the many under-40s in the UK who aren’t, for example.
My friend said it was also clear that older male bosses were “very much in hands-on mode,” especially in sectors like the energy business.
I’m still not sure what role the genre can play here.
For all the companions who say I would be happy to exchange handshakes and hugs (not to mention kisses) for bows, a namaste, or nothing at all, I know at least one man who agrees. This includes a colleague who met at a recent business meeting where a well-known bigwig opened proceedings by pumping the hands of everyone present. My partner was so dismayed that he could barely stop screwing himself in the bathroom to rub his hands.
I share it with him. However, lately, I have also discovered that, on the rare occasions when I have met someone new, a kind of muscular memory has made me shoot my hand to shake myself, after that I make a bewildered apology. and generates general embarrassment for everyone.
Unfortunately, history suggests that the pandemic will not kill the sinking of hands or any other tactile greeting.
As Ella Al-Shamahi, an evolutionary biologist, writes in her recent book: The handshake: An exciting story, the salute has survived repeated efforts to ban it during past outbreaks of cholera, flu and the like.
Since contactless chimpanzees and human tribes have similar gestures, he thinks we may be genetically difficult to shake, perhaps to deliver things like odor-related chemosignals.
Researchers have found that people are more likely to sniff their hands after a handshake than if they are received without touching them. “Primates yearn for touch,” he says. “And the elbow protrusion is really a handshake of the poor man.”
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