Make a good impression

WE had a VIP visitor at work this week and the two day run-up was a blur of repainting walls, varnishing doors, clearing workspaces and hiding the old, ugly and broken - which magically reappeared 20 minutes after the tour had passed our way.

A lot of work for a three minute fly-by visit and I couldn't help thinking that it was all a lot of hoo-ha over nothing.

At the end of the day there are hundreds of us everyday who walk down those same corridors and sit in the same offices and studios and the aesthetics of the place aren't ever made any prettier for our working comfort, why should it be any different for someone who'll forget all about the place in a day or two? It seems so fake and underhanded.

But then it hit me; it's no different to when we tidy up our houses before guests come to visit. In fact, if you talk to anyone in the UK that has a cleaning lady come in a couple of times a week or so, they'll tell you that they rush around tidying up before she gets there.

OK, to a certain extent that's got to do with the fact that cleaning ladies in the UK are so much in demand that they can pick and choose who they work for (often laying down the work conditions they'll accept - refusing to do ironing or some other task they consider too menial to bother with) but it's more to do with the fact that most people are embarrassed to show an outsider what their real living conditions are like.

It's just human nature to want to make a better impression than what we're prepared to accept for ourselves.

Day after week after month we can walk past the same pile of boxes/papers/old clothes and never even notice them, let alone give them a second glance, but the minute we know others are going to see the exact same things we feel the need to hide them and pretend that we all live in model show homes.

We seem to think that the real state in which we live isn't good enough for others to see and so we have to pretend that we're actually a lot neater/tidier/more organised than we really are. In other words we fake it.

The truth of the matter is, in one way or another, we all do it which means we all live bellow the standard that we think is acceptable for others to see and judge us by.

The fact that we're all pretty much in the same boat means that if we were to make a surprise visit to our guests' home we would probably find similar piles of discarded things lying around their houses too, so in effect it means we want to make ourselves seem better than them by pretending that we live to higher standards than they do.

The fact is, as a race, we're judgemental of others and as such expect them to judge us. We make things look prettier so that they'll be impressed with what they see, and they do the same so that we'll think more highly of them.

Rather than accepting that we all have things we'd rather not show others and just getting on with it, we have to pretend that things aren't what they really are. Basically put we think that if people discovered that we were just like them they would think less of us.

We laze around the house in our comfortable sweats with a day-old pile of dishes in the sink and don't think anything of it but when someone comes round we feel the need to pretend that we spend every lazy day off at home doing the housework in full make up, dolled up to the nines.

But if we're embarrassed by the way we live, why don't we just live to the standards we expect others to live to? Why should we accept anything less for ourselves than we think others would accept of us or indeed we accept of them? Or more to the point, why don't we just accept that perfection isn't a natural state of affairs and just live and let live? Do we really expect others not to see through the smokescreen and is that very smokescreen really hiding what we want it to hide?

Let's face it, it was all well and good wanting to make a good impression for our VIP visit and make everything look neat and tidy but he was touring a place of work, just like his own.

Did he really believe that because there were no files or papers out of place or scuff marks on the walls that we're all perfect efficient beings who live and work to a higher standard of cleanliness than everyone else on the planet or could it be possible that it all looked too perfect to be real and instead left him with the impression that we had something to hide?

And as if it weren't bad enough that we feel the need to pretend on the outside, our judgment of ourselves and each other is such that we believe we need to fake it on the inside as well.

We meet new people and we think we have to pretend we're not who we really are, putting on a fake faade to make others believe we're kinder/funnier/more thoughtful than we truly are.

We make the effort to think of romantic things to do for the new friend or love interest in our lives, we laugh at their unfunny jokes and pretend we like their favourite band - all in the interest of making them think we're the person they want to share their lives with.

And when eventually the veneer fades and the pretence slips (as it inevitably will) we're surprised that the person we fell in love with isn't really who we thought they were, ignoring completely that we've done the exact same thing ourselves.

If we're lucky we learn to love them despite the truth and go on to live happily ever after but more often than not we can't accept the differences and the whole cycle starts again, meeting someone new and one again putting on our 'better person' face because we don't think who we really are is good enough.

If we could just learn to accept the faults and failings that deep down we all know are there, life would be so much happier all round but instead we go about our lives pretending that we and our surroundings are better than they are and find happiness only in our own delusions.