The View From the ‘Hil: Hello, Goodbye

All year long, I’ve tried to get my readers to see some topic from a new view. In my final column, I want to do the same. So let me tell you a story.

A friend of mine once knew a man named Scott. Scott attended a business meeting where he got one of those stickers that say “Hello, My Name Is” at the top. He wrote his name down, slapped it on, and left the meeting having forgotten to remove the sticker.

But some people he had never met started being extra friendly to him, waving and saying “Hi Scott!” as they passed in the street. Intrigued, Scott decided to keep the sticker on for a little while longer.

Scott had been wearing his “Hello, My Name Is Scott” stickers for many years when my friend met him. He had one on his chest, one on his shirt, one on his jacket and several extras in his pocket. The sticker company had even started sending him a free supply.

Scott was mainly wearing the stickers out of habit. But he was also wearing them to challenge the way people think. Over the years, he had met many people who didn’t like that he was doing something slightly out of the ordinary. They told him to take his sticker off. When he wouldn’t, some got violent and tried to beat him up.

It saddens me to think that people would want to hurt Scott just because of a sticker, a friendly gesture. After all, “Hello, My Name Is” is one of the friendliest phrases in the English language.

But as summer nears and everyone at school gets ready to head their separate ways, “Hello” is hard to come by. The word on everyone’s lips is a sad word, a word of finality: “Goodbye.”

Over the past few weeks, I’ve bumped into several people that I’d said goodbye to over the years, including someone from a summer camp I attended four years ago, on the other side of the country. These were all people I had thought I would never see again.

I’ve realized that just because two people are going on different routes now, that doesn’t mean they won’t see each other again. This makes “goodbye” a pretty useless word.

So I’m going to end my last column with a cheery word, a word that the Beatles once offered as an alternative to “goodbye.” If Scott’s experience tells me anything, it’s that not everyone may like this deviation from the norm. But his story also reminds me that a little bit of friendliness can go a long way.

For the readers of this column that I’ve never met, I am genuinely sorry that we’ve never had the chance to exchange pleasantries. Let’s start again.

Hello. My name is Sahil. What’s yours?