Think Of It As Free, Raw Videotape
Dear Miss Manners: Several friends and I received not only holiday cards, pictures and the ever-dreaded newsletters, but also a 45-minute holiday videotape!
Our friend decided it would be neat to chronicle an entire year on video, complete with a tour of his new home, a drive-by of the country club he joined, trips with people we don’t even know, and many, many moments with his second wife and young son.
Have you ever heard such classless vulgarity, such tasteless vanity? Is this a glimpse of holiday greetings to come?
Is one expected to spend evenings making cookies, wrapping presents and watching someone’s little Susie potty-train?
It seems that each new form of technology presents its own confounding set of etiquette challenges. You will, I trust, come to the rescue and stop the insanity.
How does one respond - with our own video, detailing the birth of Spot’s puppies or Aunt Mildred’s dentures dropping into the Thanksgiving stuffing? Where will it end?
Gentle Reader: It will end this afternoon, when Susie gets home from day care, where her friends saw fit to tell her about the hilarious video they watched with their parents the night before.
Or you may have to wait until your friend realizes - from the fact that nobody reacts to his filmed biography other than to send a card as usual - that he is going to great expense to provide his friends with videotape that they must be using to record entertainment they like better from television.
Still, that’s faster action than one gets with those intimate, yet widely disseminated, newsletters. People have been trying to kill this for years, on the grounds that anyone who is close enough to be interested in such family confidences has already heard them by Christmas. And nobody else cares.
Miss Manners agrees that showing off, outside of one’s immediate and indulgent circle, is in bad taste. But it seems to her that a video is even easier to ignore - and recycle - than a letter.
Dear Miss Manners: I am mystified at how to respond to the accidental insults that slips of the finger on a keyboard make possible, now that technology has opened vast new vistas for rudeness.
I was the recipient of an e-mail message addressed to me, but obviously, from its content, meant for someone else. In it, the sender vented considerable spleen about me.
Since I have to work with this woman, I decided not to mention it, but somehow she discovered what she had done. Another missive immediately arrived, which began as an apology, but ended up a justification of her opinions as expressed in the misdirected communication. In essence, a compounding of the initial insult.
How does the polite technophile respond to such provocation, considering that it is impossible to cut someone dead with a withering stare via computer?
Gentle Reader: Sure, it is. Miss Manners assures you that these things just need a bit of updating to fit the technology.
In conventional correspondence, the equivalent of the cut is to return a letter unopened. In the case of e-mail, the idea that you didn’t open it is not convincing. But if you add at the top the message “I trust this was not intended for me,” you can, with a simple touch of the button, return to, and incidentally frustrate and annoy, an offensive sender.
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Judith Martin United Features Syndicate