Alter Ego

For many years I thought "alter ego" literally translated into "other eye." It may but that’s not the definition the dictionary has it . . . it is "another self" which for practical purposes means the equivalent of your other self.

Why is that phrase important? Because that is what we employers are looking for in employees . . . someone we can trust as if it were ourselves.

When I was in college I worked regularly at a shoe store doing what we "shoe dogs" called "smelling feet." It was an important job and income to me, and I sure wasn’t going to screw it up.

My boss and the owner of the store was Jewish of German origin. He was strict, and lived by the rules and expected you to do so. He was eccentric but a good man dedicated to being the best at what he was doing . . . and he was. I admired the old man.

Getting back to the subject . . . "alter ego" . . . I found out that the most important principle for hiring in an employer-employee relationship was "alter-ego." Could he trust you to do the same thing whether he was there or not?

I didn’t know that he was testing me and found out the way he did it by accident.

When he went into the back of the store (during my first week of employment) he stayed an inordinate amount of time. I thought, to put it crudely, he had fallen in.

Do you want to know what his trick was? As employees we had been instructed to "watch the front." That wasn’t an idle command . . . that was the law. The display windows of the shoe store were designed like a trap. If people came into the web looking at the shoes that were displayed they would be gently coaxed by us to come in and try on one of the pairs of shoes they were admiring . . . That was an integral part of this shoe store’s marketing. In those days it wasn’t shameful and it was the thing to do.

So getting to the trick of trustworthiness. You were instructed not to leave your lookout post no matter what the reason. My boss didn’t have to tell me twice. . . That job meant a lot to me. So come "H____or Highwater" I stood like a sphinx when my boss was in the back . . . and it’s a good thing. The boss was not in the bathroom as we thought. He would angle the back mirrored door and sit in the back on a stool watching our every move.

Well, I’m happy to say . . . I passed the test and worked at that shoe store until my senior year in law school when I left voluntarily.

I have an interesting question . . . How many of our present-day employees would pass my boss’s test?