Blaikie’s Guide to Modern Manners

Chance encounters

An innocent walk down the street can turn into a nightmare when somebody you’re sure you’ve never seen before claims to know you. This happens frequently to Matt. At one time he was frightened to go out of his office at lunch-time. Or you might vaguely recognise the person trying to speak to you, but that’s about it.

If you have no recollection whatsoever of the person, you’re going to have to grin and bear it. All being well, the stranger before you will have given you a handle, however fragile – the names of your mutual acquaintances, perhaps – to cling on to.

Don’t say, ‘I’m afraid I can’t remember your name.’ People don’t like being forgotten. It is a kindness to conceal your ignorance – even where it is obvious, with nothing being said, that the other person knows that you haven’t the first idea who they are. As Quentin Crisp put it, ‘Most people would rather be treated courteously than be told the truth.’

If you are the forgotten one, don’t say, ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ because however you say it it will sound like a criticism.

Being embarrassed about being embarrassed is imprisoning. Liberate yourself with low expectations. Reconcile yourself to awkwardness from the start to the finish of these chance encounters.

There ought to be some ungainly banter. ‘Hi, how are you?’ isn’t enough. Revel in the ghastliness. Expect nothing more than clichés and discomfort. Alternatives might well be condemned as ‘slick’ and ‘artificial’, anyway. Don’t forget that there’s always the chance of something better…romance, perhaps.

It is perfectly all right for one of you to take the initiative in saying goodbye, but a tendency is creeping in for this to be done in a practised and ‘professional’ manner – more a matter of tone than what is said. It is best if you can remain as bumbling and ill at ease as possible. Ideally, there should be several attempts to part, with conversation spluttering to life again in between.

Neighbours

Have the soap operas, particularly the one of this section’s name, put people off being neighbourly? If you start speaking to the neighbours you will certainly end up sleeping with most of them and marrying quite a few. Rumours about your sexuality will start flying around and you’ll have to do some more sleeping around to prove the contrary. Roughly every four years you will be the victim of a con man. In the years when you are not a victim of a con man one of the following will be bound to happen: you will be wrongly accused of either murder or major fraud, never both; your house will burn down; you will trip over a paving stone and successfully sue the council; you will disappear overseas, never to be heard of again.

It’s neighbourly where Matt lives, in a nice new-build in Peterborough. At Christmas time, they’re in and out of each other’s houses, having drinks; the mothers share the school run and there’s a summer party. But elsewhere it’s a different story. ‘Some years ago, I was struggling to get a bag of manure in and a neighbour rushed out of his house to help me,’ says Mrs Gibbs, who lives in one of a row of Victorian cottages in Winchester. ‘But whenever I’ve seen that man subsequently – not a flicker. I seem to have become invisible.’

People are peculiar. There have been other cases of neighbours steadfastly refusing to pop next door for a cup of tea or even a meal, possibly because their own house is a tip and they dread having to ask back. In other cases, hospitality is accepted but never returned. Some people avoid their neighbours on principle, dreading being stuck with them if they so much as exchange a word.

Zoe’s street in Balham is not very neighbourly but this may be to do with her habit of putting the rubbish out on the wrong day. There’s also the matter of her noisy parties…

‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ – neighbourliness is more than good manners, it is a virtue, a mark of goodness.

It doesn’t matter if your neighbours are dull or even a nuisance – they are your neighbours. You have something in common.

Don’t shun your neighbours out of mean-spiritedness – jealousy over their decor, dread of having to ask back, fear of being lumbered. This is nonsense.

If you accept hospitality from your neighbours, which you should, don’t forget to ask them back (see Do we dare to ask them back?, page 132).

Ignoring your neighbours or, even worse, ignoring them after you have spoken once or twice, is unkind and hostile. They will assume that they have given offence or that you look down on them in some way. They will be hurt.

Noise is a serious business. Loud music, banging doors, shouting etc. can cause real distress. There is the thing itself but also the feeling of being trampled all over, not shown any consideration, as well as the anxiety over whether it’s ever going to stop.

Respond readily to any requests to make less noise.

If you are planning a party with music, check with neighbours well in advance (‘We hope you won’t mind’ etc.) and give them accurate information about how long you are proposing to play music for. Invite them to the party.

The laying of flowers

Many shrines are seen by the wayside now. People lay flowers at the scenes of fatal accidents. Elsewhere, tributes are left in spots special in some way to a departed loved one or at the scenes of murders. Mrs Gibbs is suspicious. ‘My friend lives at a beauty spot in Devon. People leave flowers but they never come and clear them away when they’re over, and often they leave the plastic wrapping on. I’m also rather against the whole thing, I’m sorry to say. It’s not terribly encouraging, at my age, having all these reminders of death all over the place. And some of these roadside shrines – they go on and on, don’t they?’

If you are laying flowers in a public place, remove the plastic wrapping. Return to take away the dead flowers.

Permanent shrines are hard on the living, especially if beside roads or near houses. After six months they should be removed. Thereafter, they can be resurrected on the anniversary of the death that occurred there, provided that the flowers are removed when dead.

Work Manners (#ulink_a99b8299-134d-53f4-9d26-e45bb5b36369)

What are work manners?

A lot of people loathe automatic answering services (‘Please choose from the following eighteen options’) or shops where the assistants are more interested in choosing the next CD track than serving the customers. But what might look like bad manners is really bad business. There was an absurd clothes shop in London called Voyage that, rudely, wouldn’t let just anyone in. You had to be invited. Quite rightly, it went out of business.

Equally, good manners at work can be skin deep – adopted, often after going on a course of some kind, simply for personal advancement. Why has so-and-so suddenly started offering to help the boss’s PA with the flowers for the foyer? Or taken to making a sympathy call every time the MD is ill?

Here we look at manners that have nothing to with success or failure at work. These manners, when adopted, just make the workplace a better place to be.

Greetings

In ordinary life, deliberately ignoring someone you know, ‘blanking’ them, is a devastating act of full-scale hostility. But at work, so some people think, it’s a feather in your cap. ‘Look at me,’ they seem to say as they stump by, busy, busy, without a glimmer of recognition, ‘I’m so useful and important I’ve not got a moment to spare.’ This is what it’s like at Matt’s office – grim. People have got their heads down, they’re far too busy wondering how many column inches to devote to innovations in gear-box design on dumper trucks. They couldn’t possibly say hello. Zoe does at least say hi to the people of her own age in her PR agency, but strangely has no greeting for her managing director when she goes into her office to tell her how well she’s getting on with some new press contact.

Nothing is more dismal than a workplace where people don’t greet each other.

Greet people the first time you see them that day (however late it is) and before you launch into whatever business you have.

Senior staff often suffer the most from lack of being greeted.

Holding the door open

Endless fire doors in offices have created a manners crisis unique to the workplace. ‘What do you do,’ Matt asks, ‘when there’s a whole series of doors and the person ahead of you keeps holding them open for you? Do you thank them the first time or the last or every time?’ People often thank effusively when the first door is opened for them but become increasingly morose and sullen, giving the impression to the person trying to be polite that they are nothing but a nuisance.

Thank the first time the door is held open.

Thereafter, smile sweetly.

Don’t giggle or get fed up. Would you rather have the door slammed in your face?

At the urinal

This one is for men only. In women’s toilets, we hear, it’s chatty and unhierarchical. Although in a comprehensive school where I once taught, the deputy head was often criticised for peeing too briskly. But in the office gents, as in all public men’s toilets, silence reigns. From time to time there is a drive to institute the ‘working piss’ but it always comes to nothing. If all those lined up at the urinal are of equal status, it’s straightforward – don’t talk. Trauma only sets in when senior management are suddenly present. ‘What’s worse,’ somebody said, ‘seeing your boss’s willy or your father’s?’ Of course some pushy types, far from being disturbed, might see a chance to push.

Don’t start promoting yourself at the urinal.

If, on entering, you find the boss in the toilets, get adept, like Matt, at reversing straight out again.

Or you can go in the cubicles, but leave the door ajar to avoid suspicion.

In the lift

Lifts usually impose a complete suspension of normal life. Going up and going down, people become non-people, even mothers and children no longer know each other; everybody stares at the walls. Lifts in offices are different. Here there might be opportunities to hobnob with top people (didn’t Melanie Griffith get her big break in Working Girl when she encountered Harrison Ford in the lift?). Matt once heard ‘some whippersnapper trying to discuss the quarterly results with the MD in an embarrassingly familiar way’ and on another occasion ‘two women from accounts, which is my department, talking at the tops of their voices about the postboy’s sex life or what they imagined it to be’.

Don’t corner senior management in the lift to try and make an impression. It’s not fair on them. There’ll be other chances.

Senior management, when in the lift, should always make a point of condescending to speak.

Don’t forget that the other people in the lift can hear what you’re saying.