Not long ago, a banker I’d known stopped to see me. My employer had utilized the services of a bank where’d he’d been our Loan Officer. That job is often described as a “relationship manager”, one who makes sure that bank and borrower were working well together.
A new bank had hired him to contact the same customers he’d covered for his old employer, and I was glad to see him. Later, he telephoned to see if he could submit a more formal bid. We prepared the financial statements he’d need, and he came to get them. He’d grown a beard.
I mentioned his new hirsuteness to the company’s Chief Operating Officer, an astute man in his mid-sixties. “He grew a beard? He’s not goin’ anywhere.” was his instantaneous response.
It was the first time I’d heard anyone verbalize the thought that a beard was an indication that the grower/wearer had “peaked”, and was actually saying, “I want to let everyone who sees me know that I’ve gone about as far as I can go.”
About that time, a study was released on the difficulty of keeping a beard clean. Scientists, (whom one assumes to have been beardless) put some sort of invisible, but trackable, powder on beards and asked the wearers to wash it out. It took several days, showers, and special scrubbing before any beard was “clean”.
The obvious implication, to all but the bearded, was that germs, microbes, fleas, bedbugs, and viruses who’d made a home in a beard were equally entrenched. One realized after looking at the study that those with beards were carrying around several million “little friends” that found plenty to eat among billions of microscopic food, dust, and dirt particles within their facial hair.
“You can’t be clean with a beard.” was a conclusion so obvious that one who failed to reach and implement it had to have some motivation that was quite the opposite from wanting to publicly show that one cared about being thought perceptive enough to intelligently react to facts.
