The shopping mall: a great equalizer?

Walking to French class yesterday, I got to thinking about power. I've been meeting with a lot of sr. execs the past few weeks and I find the whole thing kind of funny. People respond to their emails, people bend over backwards to make them happy, people are in awe of them. Generally I've found most of them to be very nice but other than a certain confidence and the fact that most of them are well put-together, they're normal. At the university things were a bit different in that you could feel fairly comfortable emailing the president and at least know that your boss wouldn't say anything about it (as long as you weren't being stupid). This is a whole new world. It's funny to think though, when I'm sitting on the bus, chatting with the person next to me or in a shopping mall fighting over a great parking spot, that person could be the president of some company. The snarky woman at Zellers is just as cranky with me as the next person who could be an ADM. Giving someone the finger because they cut you off in traffic? You could be asking your boss to email them asking for information the next day because you aren't senior enough in the workplace to email them directly.