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Benjamin’s observations sang true to my open ears, but I sensed that the melody of the modern retail worker contained still richer timbres. He had described the perspective of an employee making thoughtful decisions that ultimately served the greater welfare of the store, but the Hallmark guy had been acting via instinct, not his gray matter. Why did he respond differently than Benjamin would have?

The journalist Art Kleiner offers one rather dismal answer in his book Who Really Matters? The Hallmark clerk struck a deal with his supervisors that effectively sells off his brain for each eight-hour shift behind the register. We tend to automatically bestow the mantle of legitimacy upon the shoulders of our bosses; we do what they want us to do. Eventually, says Kleiner, this transforms into us doing what we think they’d want us to do. We create a miniature, mental version of our supervisors, and then consult this imaginary stand-in whenever an issue arises. Frank the real-life boss might have once said in passing, “Could you order me some more blue pens?;” henceforth, the mental Frank will decree, “At this company we use blue pens, so don’t you dare use a black one on any official forms!” Thus our decisions are easier, faster. Now you’re using blue ink on all your paperwork, even if it doesn’t show up very well on corporate’s new green forms. Our gift to those above us in the company hierarchy is legitimacy, and their dubious gift to us is simplified cognition. Such a trade-off perfectly explains not only the dead-eyed Hallmark guy, but also the girl at the candy counter, who imagined her boss as literally peering down at her from the ceiling, like some adjudicating god.

In an infamous experiment on obedience, the psychologist Stanley Milgram led test subjects to believe they were administering electrical shocks to individuals in another room. The troubling results showed that as long as an official-looking representative stood nearby and nodded for them to continue, a majority of people would administer continually greater shocks, some going all the way to the highest voltage even when the supposed victim had become nonresponsive. Having an authority figure to look toward releases us from feeling personally responsible for our decisions and actions. Not my problem; I just work here. Milgram also carried out many variations on this experiment. In one, he played with the physical presence of the authority figure, removing him from the room and having him give the subject instructions over the phone. Subjects complied far less readily without the authority figure looming over them in person.

The disquieting implication of Kleiner’s argument is that the work environment is short-circuiting this last effect, bending the employee’s will permanently toward following the instructions of a boss-avatar perched on her shoulder.

Rather than pursue these dour reflections further, I suggested we shelve the typo hunting for now and head for RadioShack. We hoped to find a new battery for the video camera my cousin had mailed us in South Carolina, but they’d apparently stopped manufacturing batteries for this model right around the time that Murphy Brown went off the air. I passed by a whiteboard on our way out, then spun around and headed back inside. A different clerk greeted us, and I said, “Sorry. I noticed something on the whiteboard out there that I don’t think is quite right. Isn’t there a double s in ‘Sony Ericsson’?”

“I think so,” she said, and followed me out to the very edge of her jurisdiction. I’d been reaching for my camera to take a quick photo, but she took one look and, while saying, “Yeah, that’s wrong,” swiped a hand across the last two letters of the original rendering, ERICSON.

Wow! Immediate action! So immediate that I swore that, from this day forward, I would be certain to snap a photo before mentioning a given typo to anyone. As it happened, I now had a dry-erase marker, albeit not in exactly the right color, that could aid in the correction.