Time & Perspective Quote by Doug Coupland

Coupland lands the joke with the breezy cruelty of a consumer-age anthropologist: the “only major business advantage” line is obviously false, which is precisely why it hits. He’s not offering an economic thesis so much as skewering the way we retrofit national myths onto mundane habits. Empire, finance, class discipline, and industrial infrastructure get comically flattened into one tiny performance: how you sound when you say hello.

The phone is doing double duty here. It’s a literal technology of connection and a symbol of late-capitalist service culture, where labor increasingly means managing impressions. “Politely answer a phone” is shorthand for a whole soft-skills regime: calm voice, frictionless deference, the ability to project competence while hiding irritation. Coupland frames that as a specifically English talent, not because it’s innate, but because Englishness is culturally coded as restraint, courtesy, and a certain practiced neutrality. The subtext is that in a globalized market, power often travels through tone before it travels through policy.

There’s also a sly jab at everyone else: most people “have no idea” not because they’re rude, but because they haven’t been trained to treat every interaction as a customer-service audition. That’s Coupland’s larger preoccupation: the way modern life turns personality into interface. The line about “two centuries” pushes it into satire, mocking our obsession with competitive advantage and the fantasy that success can be reduced to a hack. What looks like a compliment is really an indictment of a world where politeness becomes a commodity and national identity becomes branding.