saying wear a tux. What I am saying is that many pit bosses are observers, and will likely pay more attention to you if your total image does not equate in their minds.

A more important area is the importance of looking comfortable.

I was a great deal younger and longer of hair when the hijackings to Cuba first forced airlines to search passengers and use metal detectors. My hair was halfway down my back. (A Caesars pit boss once mistook me for Jimmy Page. If I could have faked a British accent, I would have been given a suite to trash.) Despite my long hair, I was always waved through without a search, while some businessmen would be patted down and have their briefcases opened. I delighted in businessmen that would complain, “Why are you searching me and not the hippie?”

There was a reason. In the ’60s, because of my hair, I had been stopped and questioned over 100 times by the police and often searched for simply walking down the street. I was used to it, and the sight of guards searching people meant nothing to me. People not used to this would look nervous. Security guards cannot search everyone, so they are trained to look for signs of nervousness: lack of eye contact, sweaty palms and upper lip, tense muscles, strained voice, jerky motions, clenched jaw, excessive blinking, grinding teeth, slight muscle spasms, flushed skin. It is very difficult to control your body’s reaction to stress. The only sure-fire way is not to feel stress in the first place.

I have many stories like this including walking past guards into restricted areas of the Pentagon Annex, and walking into IBM and using computers, without any authorization, as a teen. Of course walking past Pentagon guards is not as difficult as ignoring the lines and bouncers at New York nightclubs and just walking in. If you look comfortable with what you are doing, people tend to be comfortable with you. Unfortunately, I am not as good at this as I was in my youth. My point with all this rambling is that the most important aspect of comportment is not looking like you are doing something wrong, or pretending to be something that you aren’t. Retail folk will read your body language.

 © 2009 Norman Wattenberger