Miss Manners: Politeness takes its toll on summer motoring

Dear Miss Manners: Every working day, I pass over a toll bridge on my way to and from work. In the summer, when I have the air conditioner turned on, I always turn it off as I approach the toll taker.

I was rather unconscious of this until recently when I had a passenger named Dave along, and as I reached for the on-off switch, Dave beat me to the punch. As we left the tollbooth, I switched the air conditioner back on, and after a few seconds I asked Dave why he had done it.

He had no memory of doing so. We discussed this behavior for several minutes and concluded that somehow it seemed rude to have the cold air blasting out of the car as we were transacting our business with the toll taker.

Is this behavior covered by some more general rule, or are we just being finicky?

Gentle Reader: Are you implying that there is something wrong with being finicky? Uh-oh.

Yet Miss Manners had never heard of this refinement, and it is all the more impressive that you were both unthinkingly polite.

There is a lot of the other kind of unthinking behavior on the roads, including at tollbooths, so if you promise Miss Manners that this is a real courtesy that doesn’t hold up the works, she congratulates you both on the discovery.

Dear Miss Manners: Please provide guidelines for terminating unpleasant conversations with a person seated next to me on an airplane.

On one journey, the fellow in the adjacent seat started a conversation by telling me that he was curious about my opinion of U.S. policy in Iraq. When I told him that I did not wish to discuss the subject, he loudly said: “Oh, then you just don’t care about the troops.”

Patiently, I told a falsehood, stating that my day had been difficult and that I simply wished to be alone.

Several months later, another passenger began a similar exchange, and I perhaps overreacted by stating that I had no interest in his opinions and remained confident that we could finish the flight without another word to each other.

Although this worked, I was visibly saddened.

To avoid the social sin of committing verbal abuse or the intolerability of being the subject of such, I ask Miss Manners to suggest a utilitarian and perfectly polite sentence or two for turning one’s fellow passengers to the “off” position.

Gentle Reader: Alas, this is how rudeness spreads. You reacted politely to rudeness, but then let the rude response you got push you into self-doubt and into being rude yourself on the next similar occasion.

The way to deal with such rude people is to refuse to deal with them, which you did. Being rude, he took a parting shot, but then you were quit of him.

In the second instance, you accomplished this by being rude yourself.

It was perfectly all right to say that you had had a difficult day and wished to be alone. It was even the literal truth, as your seatmate had created the difficulty and you did, indeed, wish him to leave you alone. It also worked.

But did you really want to copy the manners of those you found offensive?