I Knew It! I Knew It!

Smiling makes you sick. According to German researchers, persons who work in customer service type jobs that require them to look and act friendly have more stress and therefore, get sick more often than those who can be rude. The problem is that if you act happy when you're really not, you can become depressed. They studied a call center in which half of the participants responded to rude and angry callers in like fashion, and the other half responded in a friendly and good humored manner. The results showed that replying in a friendly way when you'd rather be rude, does nothing more than add to your stress. Dieter Zapf and collegues say the notion that "the customer is always right" should be abandoned.