How you treat the cashier when nobody’s watching is the truest line on your résumé.

Behavior aimed at people who can do something for you is strategy, and almost anyone can manage it for an hour. What you are like toward somebody with no power over your life, on a day nobody is recording, is the only clean reading available. It leaks out later anyway, because people who are casually rude to staff turn out to be casually rude to coworkers. The pattern does not stay inside the store.

In one transaction this week, take the phone off your ear, read the name tag, and say thanks like you meant it. Small, unwitnessed, and exactly the kind of thing that hardens into a default.