“When you do it right, it’s like you’ve done nothing at all,” 43-year Kenny Sanders of Medford, Oregon, abruptly told Lousy Human as he passed this reporter on the street. Kenny, who prides himself on being liked but not well-liked, added, “It really helps around the office. People like me enough to engage me in daily conversation but not enough to invite me to their weekend cookouts or happy hour, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“The key is to be warm, but surface level warm, where people consciously don’t know you are being disingenuous, but their soul knows.” One of Sanders’s favorite examples of this is something he refers to as the ‘Name Game.’ “That’s when you don’t commit people’s names to memory but just give them an ironic generic nickname based on physical features like “Big man!” if the person is male and slight in stature or “shorty” if someone is abnormally tall. “They won’t know if you’re friendly enough for nicknames or if you genuinely can’t remember their real one.”

Sanders said that his technique of being “entry-level” nice doesn’t just work at the office but has also extended to the upper echelon of his family.

“When granny Sanders died, most of her grandchildren were asked to do a reading or publicly participate in the service in some way, not me,” concluded Sanders with a wry smile before disappearing into the crowd of sidewalk traffic from which he came.