Talk to the Hand. Lynne Truss

by a briefly extended index finger, which is (curiously) usually good enough for most of us.

      What has happened to the rituals of what Goffman called “supportive interchange”? They have gone disastrously awry, that’s what. Last year I was a passenger in another woman’s car in Denver, Colorado. Waiting at a junction, we received a wave from two young men in a car alongside. I smiled back, and then asked my companion whether the chaps might want something. She opened my window and called across, “Can I help you?” At which the driver of the other car stopped smiling and yelled, “What do you mean, can I help you? I was only being Effing friendly! Why don’t you get back to your Cherry Creek Country Club, you rich bitches!” and drove off. Of course, we were both taken aback. My companion, interestingly, was upset most by the insulting accusation of wealth. It annoyed her very much to be called a rich bitch. For my own part, however, I just kept thinking, “But surely a simple ‘No, thank you’ would have sufficed? What was wrong with ‘No, thank you’ in that situation?”

      There is a theory of manners that uses the fiscal image of balancing the books, and I consider it a good one to begin with. For every good deed there is a proportionate acknowledgement which precisely repays the giver; in this world of imaginary expenditure and income, the aim is to emerge from each transaction with no one in the red. This involves quite a lot of sophisticated mental micro-calculation and fine moral balancing, so it’s small wonder that many people now find that they simply can’t be arsed. Nowadays, you open a door for somebody and instead of saying, “Thank you”, they just think, “Oh good” and go through it. This can be very annoying if you are standing there expectantly with your pen poised and your manners ledger open at the right page. All you can enter in the credit columns is flower doodles, and these in no way salve your shock and disappointment.

      Why are people adhering less to the Ps and Qs? Where does that leave those of us who wince every day at the unspoken “thank you” or the unthought-of “sorry”? Is there a strategy for cancelling the debt? Should we abandon our expectations of reciprocity? And isn’t it confusing that our biggest experience of formal politeness comes from the recorded voices on automated switchboards – who patently don’t mean it? “We are sorry we cannot connect you at this time,” says the voice. But does it sound sorry? No, it doesn’t. It is just saying the politeness words in as many different combinations as it can think of. “Please hold. Thank you for holding. We are sorry you are having to hold. We are sorry to say please. Excuse us for saying sorry. We are sorry to say thank you. Sorry, please, thank you. Thank you, sorry, please.” An interesting rule applies here, I find: the more polite these messages, the more apoplectic and immoderate you become, as you lose twenty-five minutes from your life that could have been spent, more entertainingly, disinfecting the S-bend. “Thank you for choosing to wait for an adviser,” says the voice. “Choose?” you yell back. “I didn’t Effing choose this! Don’t tell me what I Effing chose!”

       2 Why am I the One Doing This?

      This is quite a new source of irritation, but it goes deep. As I noted in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, good punctuation is analogous to good manners. The writer who neglects spelling and punctuation is quite arrogantly dumping a lot of avoidable work onto the reader, who deserves to be treated with more respect. I remember, some years ago, working alongside a woman who would wearily scribble phone messages on a pad, and then claim afterwards not to be able to read her own handwriting. “What does that say?” she would ask, rather unreasonably, pushing the pad at me. She was quite serious: it wasn’t a joke. I would peer at the spidery scrawl, making out occasional words. “Oh, you’re a big help,” she would say, finally chucking the whole thing at me. “I’m going out for a smoke.” This was an unacceptable transfer of effort, in my opinion. I spotted this at the time, and have continued to spot it. In my opinion, there is a lot of it about.

      Just as the rise of the internet sealed the doom of grammar, so modern communications technology contributes to the end of manners. Wherever you turn for help, you find yourself on your own. Say you phone a company to ask a question and are blocked by that Effing automatic switchboard. What happens? Well, suddenly you have quite a lot of work to do. There is an unacceptable transfer of effort. In the past, you would tell an operator, “I’m calling because you’ve sent my bill to the wrong address three times”, and the operator, who (and this is significant) worked for this company, would attempt to put you through to the right person. In the age of the automated switchboard, however, we are all coopted employees of every single company we come into contact with. “Why am I the one doing this?” we ask ourselves, twenty times a day. It is the general wail of modern life, and it can only get worse. “Why not try our self-check-in service?” they say, brightly. “Have you considered on-line banking?” “Ever fancied doing you own dental work?” “DIY funerals: the modern way.”

      People who object to automated switchboards are generally dismissed as grumpy old technophobes, of course. But to me it seems plain that modern customer relations are just rude, because switchboards manifestly don’t attempt to meet you half-way. Manners are about imagination, ultimately. They are about imagining being the other person. These systems force us to navigate ourselves into channels that are plainly for someone else’s convenience, not ours. And they then have the nerve, incidentally, to dress this up as a kind of consumer freedom. “Now you can do all this yourself!” is the message. “Take the reins. Run the show. Enjoy the shallow illusion of choice and autonomy. And by the way, don’t bother trying to by-pass this system, buddy, because it’s a hell of a lot smarter than you are.”

      This “do-it-yourself” tactic occurs so frequently, in all parts of life, that it has become unremarkable. In all our encounters with businesses and shops, we now half expect to be treated not as customers, but as system trainees who haven’t quite got the hang of it yet. “We can’t deal with your complaint today because Sharon only comes in on Tuesdays,” they say. “Right-oh,” you say. “I’ll remember that for next time.” In a large store, you will be trained in departmental demarcations, so that if you are buying a towel, you have to queue at a different counter – although there is no way you could discover this without queuing at the wrong counter first. Nothing is designed to put the customer’s requirements above those of the shop. The other day, in a chemist’s on Tottenham Court Road, the pharmacist accidentally short-changed me by £1, and then, with sincere apologies, said I would have to wait until he served his next customer (whenever that might be), because he didn’t have a password for the till. While we were discussing the likelihood of another customer ever happening along, another till was opened, a few yards away. I asked if he could get me my change from the other till, and he said, with a look of panic, “Oh no, it has to come from this one.” Now, this was not some callow, under-educated youth. This was a trained pharmacist; a chap with a brain. I suggested that he could repay the other till later – and it was as though I had explained the theory of relativity. He was actually excited by such a clever solution, which would never have occurred to him. Lateral thinking on behalf of the customer’s convenience simply wasn’t part of his job.

       3 My Bubble, My Rules

      This is the issue of “personal space”, about which we are growing increasingly touchy. One of the great principles of manners, especially in Britain, is respecting someone else’s right to be left alone, unmolested, undisturbed. The sociolinguists P. Brown and S. C. Levinson, in their book Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (1987), coined the useful term “negative politeness” for this. The British are known to take this principle to extremes, because it chimes with our natural reticence and social awkwardness, and we are therefore simply outraged when other people don’t distinguish sufficiently between public and private space. The advent of the mobile phone was a disaster for fans of negative politeness. We are forced to listen, openmouthed, to other people’s intimate conversations, property transactions, business arrangements, and even criminal deals. We dream up revenges, and fantasise about pitching phones out of the window of a moving train. Meanwhile, legislation on smoking in public places has skewed our expectations of negative politeness, so that if a person now lights a cigarette in our presence anywhere, we cough and gag and mutter, and furiously