How Rude Are We?

For humans, the act of eating has always been characterized by ritual, no matter how spontaneous or impulsive the effort. And in a wide sweeping attempt to chronicle the development of civilized dining, it can be argued convincingly that the rules of food consumption eventually lead to the conduct of human behavior. Table manners are social agreements emphasizing that no one will intrude upon others' sensitivities. To share food is the ultimate in social behavior because it implies the forging of a family relationship although the event may last only for a short time. In some cultures, it is correct to be silent while eating . . . in others, one must continue to talk (we have met not merely to eat, but also to commune with fellow human beings).

From this perspective, it is overwhelmingly evident that manners in deportment, behavior and speech will follow and that conforming to such rules, decreed or implied, creates harmony, orderliness and class distinctions and, in excess, snobbery. Are we witnessing a deterioration of these structures that is inevitably linked with growing chaos in our society?

Modern manners increasingly force us to be casual . . . Politeness, whether formal or informal, has always involved manipulating social distance. The kind of politeness that we call formality deliberately keeps people apart. Its purpose is partly to prevent prying and to slow down the process of familiarization in order to give each party time to appraise the other. Modern society has more than enough devices for keeping people apart. We sleep in separate rooms, live and eat in separate quarters, move around within the closed doors of metal vehicles . . . When we meet, therefore, with the express purpose of socializing, we cannot afford to be distant.

Manners are not always restrictive. They also pressure people into behaving in predictable fashion: when we know what to do and expect, we can interact on occasions, relying upon the rules of politeness to deal with the apprehensions of meeting others, making decisions, conferring, parting and commemorating. Rituals are there, to make difficult passage easier.

"Manners" govern relationships with other people primarily in situations of close personal contact; they do not constitute virtue, but they do set out to imitate virtue's outward appearance. They are an admission of an ideal.

Cell Phones, Bluetooth and Texting

Dos and Don'ts
1. Never take a personal mobile call during a business meeting. This includes interviews and meetings with co-workers or subordinates.
2. Maintain at least a 10-foot zone from anyone while talking.
3. Never talk in elevators, libraries, museums, restaurants, cemeteries, theaters, dentist or doctor waiting rooms, places of worship, auditoriums or other enclosed public spaces, such as hospital emergency rooms or buses. And don't have any emotional conversations in public — ever.
4. Don't use loud and annoying ring tones that destroy concentration and eardrums. Grow up!
5. Never "multi-task" by making calls while shopping, banking, waiting in line or conducting other personal business.
6. Keep all cellular congress brief and to the point.
7. Use an earpiece in high-traffic or noisy locations. That lets you hear the amplification, or how loud you sound at the other end, so you can modulate your voice.
8. Tell callers when you're talking on a mobile, so they can anticipate distractions or disconnections.
9. Demand "quiet zones" and "phone-free areas" at work and in public venues, like the quiet cars on the Amtrak Metroliner.
10. Inform everyone in your mobile address book that you've just adopted the new rules for mobile manners. Ask them to do likewise. Please.
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Cell phone conversations of questionable importance have become part of the soundtrack of our lives.
Modern-day etiquette is being highlighted and mobile manners are being encouraged with special phone zones created by businesses.
With 147 million wireless phone users in the U.S., restaurants have become particularly problematic as offending users gab away, oblivious of other patrons.

"When people go to restaurants they’ll take a cell phone call while dining,“ said Jacqueline Whitmore, founder of The Protocol School of Palm Beach and cell phone etiquette spokesperson for Sprint, adding that personal conversations overheard in public is the most frequent cell phone related complaint she hears.
"If you’re at a restaurant, let your companions know ahead of time if you are expecting a call, then step away from the table, take the call and make it brief," she said. "Find a place that’s not within hearing range of other people – and that does not include a bathroom.”

Answering that call, some restaurants have installed cell phone booths to preserve the peace and quiet.

The Brooklyn Café in Atlanta recently installed an antique red phone booth from the streets of London just outside to give diners a private place to converse. While mobile phones aren’t banned at the café, owner Greg Pyne said he wanted to guide patrons toward politeness.

“It’s my job to provide my customers with a napkin, not to teach them how to use a napkin,” he said. “I’m giving [people] an opportunity to use their manners if they are so inclined, and a lot of people have been so inclined.”

Another booth has popped up at the Main Street Bistro in Sarasota, Fla., where live entertainment can make cell phone calls problematic.
“You can go into it for quiet, and not sound like you are talking in a loud bar," bistro staffer Heather Mushrush said of the old French phone booth now used by cell phone owners.
Since its installment in January, Mushrush said the booth has been used daily and is particularly popular when bands play. “It’s right in the bar so you can just walk a few steps and be in the booth instead of going outside.”

If there's a rude wireless user in proximity, the best way to deal with the offending person is to get someone of authority involved, Whitmore said. Speaking up against cellular noise sparked execs to action in one case.

In 2000, transportation giant Amtrak added “Quiet Cars” to its fleet after 20 daily commuters between Philadelphia and Washington asked for a quiet oasis, said Amtrak spokesperson Dan Stessle.
“From that request the Quiet Cars spread. Now almost every train in the northeast corridor has one Quiet Car in which cellular and other electronic sounds are prohibited," he said.
Even elsewhere on the train, Stessle said passengers are becoming more cell phone sensitive. “Many people are now using the vestibules or the café car if they have a long conversation to make.”

Whitmore said advisories to silence cellulars are also becoming commonplace.
"The first thing most speakers say when welcoming a crowd is 'Please turn your cell phones and pagers off.' When you open up a program at a play there is a request to turn them off and at the movie theater there are signs that say 'Silence is golden,'" she said. "This is just something we didn’t see five years ago.”
Rude behavior on mobiles can also be curbed by using options such as text messaging, distinctive rings to ID an urgent call and silent mode, Whitmore said. However, “most people aren't even aware that they have them.”

Pyne agreed that people are enamored with their cellular gadgets, but he senses a change in some customers' behavior.
"Every time there's new technology you need to have list of etiquette. Manners are the fine-tuning that comes last. Right now we're still in the, 'Oh cool, I can take the call' phase," he said. "But those who are cognizant of that here can use the booth."

With Manners Perception is Reality

The following article describes the fall from grace of a Harvard University President and was published by a Boston Magazine.

“When visitors came to his office, Summers propped his feet up on a table, sometimes with his shoes off. He often appeared in public with a toothpick dangling from his mouth. He repeatedly mangled the names of people he was greeting or introducing. If someone said something he deemed uninteresting or foolish, he would conspicuously roll his eyes. Other times Summers would stare into space when being spoken to, as if no one else were in the room. “Larry’s always looking away,” says one junior professor. “At first you think he’s scanning the room for someone more important, but no, he’s just looking away.” And then there was the recurring problem of his eating and talking at the same time, during which Summers sometimes sprayed saliva on his audience….

The Harvard Crimson… repeatedly noted how Summers’s lack of social graces impeded his interaction with students and faculty. The new president’s manners, or lack thereof, were so widely discussed that student reporters were really just transcribing an omnipresent campus conversation.
Summers also had a bizarre habit of falling asleep in public. Eyewitnesses caught him dozing at a talk by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, a lecture by United Nations head Kofi Annan, a speech by Mikhail Gorbachev in Sanders Theatre, a service at Harvard Hillel, and a festival celebrating cultural diversity.

When he was more engaged by speakers, Summers often acted derisively toward them. At one fall 2001 meeting with the law-school faculty, a female professor asked a question that Summers didn’t think much of. “That’s a stupid question,” he responded. Later that autumn, he brusquely terminated an interview with a female journalist from the Financial Times after a disagreement over whether his remarks were on or off the record. Just as they had at Treasury, his aides insisted that Summers’s style was typical of the intellectual free-for-all that characterized economics seminars and that people shouldn’t take it personally. Inevitably, they did.

So great was the bewilderment over Summers’s lack of social skills that some in the Harvard community wondered if there might be a clinical reason for his behavior: a neurobiological disorder called Asperger’s syndrome”.

Perfect Polish That Is Unpretentious

Just as no chain is stronger than its weakest link, no manners can be expected to stand a strain beyond their daily test at home, work and play. Etiquette, remember, is merely a collection of forms by which all personal contacts in life are made smooth. The necessity for a "rough" man to become polished so that he may meet men of cultivation on an equal footing is the hallmark of conscious and deliberate behavior.

By definition: to be pretentious is to act expressive of affected, unwarranted, or exaggerated importance, worth, or stature. In short; to reach above and beyond ones grasp.

For those that put on airs and stretch in that manner suffer ultimately by positioning themselves to fall. From their extended desires and ambiguous beliefs instability occurs and is recognized by those in the know. So how does ambition, desire and longing become acceptable means of elevating oneself to a higher status?

It is when honing, skill and inspiration become your guiding influence, then and only then can an individual navigate freely through the ranks. It is said that “Polished Brass will pass through the hands of more men than Rough Gold”. This adage echoes the sentiment that acts of gratitude (the inherent mark in each new beginning) and civilized demeanor provide for the smooth passage way of ascension and acceptance.

Promotions Through Presence and Poise

The most advertised commodity is not always intrinsically the best, but is sometimes merely the product of a company with plenty of money to spend on advertising.
In the same way, money brings certain people before the public—sometimes they are persons of "quality," quite as often the so-called "society leaders" featured in the public press do not belong to good society at all, in spite of their many published photographs and the energies of their press-agents. Or possibly they do belong to "smart" society; but if too much advertised, instead of being the "queens" they seem, they might more accurately be classified as the court jesters of to-day.

To entertain the mistaken notion that politeness implies all give and little or no return, it is well to recall Coleridge's definition of a gentleman: "We feel the gentlemanly character present with us and with the ease of a habit, a person shows respect to others in such a way as at the same time implies, in his own feelings, an assured anticipation of reciprocal respect from them to himself". In short, the gentlemanly character arises out of the feeling of equality acting as a habit, yet flexible to the varieties of rank, and modified without being disturbed or superseded by them.

Thus Society is not a fellowship of the wealthy, nor does it seek to exclude those who are not of exalted birth; but it is an association of gentle-folk, of which good form in speech, charm of manner, knowledge of the social amenities, and instinctive consideration for the feelings of others, are the credentials by which society the world over recognizes its chosen members.