Pod writes: That’s a lovely story, Rod, but I have to tell you, when some kid just out of college calls me “sir,” I immediately think of Eddie Haskell and wonder what his angle is. …and suddenly, all those fresh-faced wingers from Auburn, Sewanee, Ole Miss and Tulane finally understand why they never got a callback from the Weekly Standard or the New York Post about that internship they interviewed with you for.

Seriously, I wonder if what happened with the Houston lawyer — none of the job candidates who refused to use “sir” got taken seriously — has ever happened in reverse up North. If I were a kid just out of college interviewing for a job outside of the South, I would use the “sir,” because that’s the cultural expectation where I come from, and even though I would have imagined things were more lax in the North, I still would have used it on the grounds that one is safer to be more formally polite than risk being overly familiar.