I called my boss 'mate' and had an existential crisis
I was at a work social the other day when I accidentally called my boss – a wealthy older male – ‘mate’. I’ve only been at the company for a few months. He handed me a beer, and it just slipped out.
“Cheers mate.”
Then my eyes bulged out of my head and I ran away.
You don’t call your new boss ‘mate’. Jeff Bezos’s employees do not look up from the worktables they’re chained to as he passes and say “Alright mate!”. There’d be hell to pay: Bezos trembling with indignation as the worker is immediately airlifted out of the factory by drones and dropped into a volcano. Not calling the boss ‘mate’ is 101 of keeping your head down.
The next day, as I was in the midst of my usual Saturday morning ‘lie in bed and mentally scroll back through every humiliating thing that transpired the previous evening’, I returned again and again to Mate-gate. Something about it bothered me. I knew it felt weird calling my boss ‘mate’, but I couldn’t put my finger on why.
I go through phases when it comes to addressing people. For a long time, ‘man’ was my go-to. Yeah man. Thanks man. You’re standing on my foot, man. For a while I moved onto ‘dude’, because I’m a bit of a slacker and it felt apt. I’ve never been much of a ‘pal’ guy: I feel you have to look at least a bit hard to say pal, and I look like Tin Tin, so.
A couple of years ago I had a lot of fun calling everyone ‘buddy’, thinking it extremely personable, until my friend pulled me aside and told me to stop addressing everybody as though they were my pets. I dabbled in ‘bro’ for a time, but it always sounded odd and stilted coming from my own larynx, like Homer Simpson hammering his thumb and exclaiming ‘bloody norah’.
Then there’s ‘mate’. It’s inoffensive, it’s genderless, and it’s timeless – dating back to at least the fourteenth century. It’s so powerfully British that each time I say it I get a little jolt of national pride. I can’t help but imagine an American pilot, his plane shot down into the Channel during the Second World War, wading ashore at Dover to be greeted with an outstretched palm and:
“Hello mate. Welcome to Blighty.”
Aside from being as emblematic of these sceptered isles as the Queen’s side profile, ‘mate’ is incredibly versatile. Much like the sentence ‘I never stole that one’ – the meaning of which changes entirely depending on which word you stress – uttering ‘mate’ in any of a hundred tones gives it any of a hundred meanings. The word ‘mate’ can be integral in:
Greeting someone
“Hello mate!”
Being polite
“Could I order two pints of cider, please mate?”
Expressing disbelief
“Mate. Thirteen quid for two ciders?”
Hammering a point home
“Listen mate, I am telling you, I’m not paying for those.”
Starting a pub brawl
“You want to step outside, mate?”
Apologising
“Whew, I’m sorry mate, I don’t know what came over me.”
There are further, subtler uses for the word too. Calling a potential suitor ‘mate’ enough times gives a pretty strong indication that you only see them as a friend. And yet, somehow, the opposite is also true: it can be a genuine indication of warmth, affection, and even love.
“She’s my best mate <3”
But none of this explains why I was mortified to have called my boss ‘mate’. For that, we have to pirouette away down the annals of history, to an encounter I watched unfold at high school, aged twelve. My friend waved hello to a teacher walking down the corridor, and said in a cheery voice:
“Alright, mate!”
The teacher in question – monosyllabic and surly at the best of times – spun around with fire in his eyes.
“Young man, I assure you I am not your mate.”
And, after much rumination on this (I’m a hoot at parties I swear), I figured out it: ‘mate’ is imbued with a subconscious notion of hierarchy (honestly, I’m great at parties, please believe me).
I wouldn’t dream of using the term with a girlfriends’ parents, a CEO, or a police officer, but I definitely do use ‘mate’ with shopkeepers and bar staff and… basically everybody else.
Calling someone ‘mate’ places the two of you on a level. You might be a pauper and they might be the Monopoly Man, but if you greet them with ‘hello mate’, you’re effectively implying that you believe you could be friends – and equal friends, at that.
But equality is not equity. Me and the Monopoly Man, slumped on the sofa dipping Doritos into a massive jar of salsa together. To me this would be excellent fun. To the Monopoly Man it would not. ‘Mate’, therefore, can be an insult or a compliment, depending each party’s assumption on where they stand socially.
It felt so awkward to call my much older and wealthier boss ‘mate’ because, by doing so, I’d unintentionally dragged him down a few rungs on the societal ladder, in order to pair him up with me as a potential friend.
He might not have cared at all, of course. It’s only a word. But then: if I was babysitting a six-year-old and the first thing they uttered to me was ‘alright, mate’, I’d be wrenching the batteries from their Nintendo and flinging them out of the window. So I kind of get it.
‘Mate’, we can therefore conclude, changes in severity and weight based on the context it’s used in. It can be friendly, it can be standoffish. It can indicate love or indifference. And, perhaps subconsciously, our usage of it can tell us a lot about how we are perceived in society – and how we believe we deserve to be perceived.
It is for these reasons I shan’t be using ‘mate’ anymore.
From now on, I think I’ll play it safe. I’ll just call everyone Bossman.
Written by Dan Hackett
Dan is a copywriter living in Bristol. He wrote his first novel last year, though he's not tried to get it published yet. Instead, he is currently sitting on it like a goose on an egg, refusing to let it hatch, mortified at the prospect of releasing it out into the world. If you fancy telling him to get his act together, his Twitter is here. Oh and he writes about travelling sometimes, too.
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