You See, It’s All In The Timing
Dear Miss Manners: This year my brother moved away from home to college. His room is bigger, so my mom was going to move me into it. My brother found out and said “No way.”
Would it be polite to just kick my brother out like this, or should we wait awhile?
Gentle Reader: Miss Manners heartily suggests that you wait. In due course, you, too, will go off to college. If, upon returning home, you find that your wastebasket has been moved from one side of the room to the other, you will brood that your family was happy to be rid of you, probably never cared about you in the first place, and has now left you homeless.
Even without being moved out of his room, your brother will undoubtedly find a way to make the same point. It would be well for you to stay out of his way when this happens.
The optimum time for you to take over his quarters would be the first time he announces that he is spending a school vacation elsewhere - visiting a friend, perhaps, or taking a summer job away from home - and is loudly making the point that he has now grown up.
Dear Miss Manners: Who should take the initiative to call the other party after a disconnection? Should both parties continue to dial the other at the same time, or should one person assume the responsibility?
A mutual friend set me up on a blind date with her friend; she knows him both socially and professionally. This gentleman and I had an initial phone conversation and the following week we spoke again. During our second conversation, we were disconnected.
Because I did not know who should accept responsibility for this error, I was unsure which individual should be obligated to call the other party back. After waiting a minute for him to call me, I decided to call and made a connection.
Gentle Reader: You were lucky you ever talked to this gentleman again. The standard procedure is that both people wait a minute for the other to call back, and then dial each other at once and get busy signals.
This, as you shrewdly guessed, is why we have rules of etiquette. Unfortunately, however, we have two such rules:
1. The person who initiated the call should be the one to call back.
2. The person responsible for disconnecting should call back.
Dear Miss Manners: I’m a great fan of computers (I’m using one right now) but I don’t think they should be used to write thank-you notes.
Do you think I’m too old-fashioned when I’m offended by the one I received from a recent graduate? It was obvious that the writer merely changed the name of the gift in each copy and signed his name. The address on the envelope was also typed. Surely, even in our computerized world, this is going too far.
Gentle Reader: Thank-you letters should be written by hand. Miss Manners, who does not consider acts of kindness subject to fashion, grants exceptions only to people with specific physical disabilities that prevent them from writing. Those who claim illegible handwriting should be home practicing their penmanship instead of bragging about it.
Even if the beneficiary of your generosity was one of those exceptions, that letter would have fallen seriously short of being polite. When one cannot hand-write such a formal letter as an expression of thanks, one must supply an apology.
Also, the fact that it was a form letter should have been disguised. One reason Miss Manners is also a fan of computers is that they make it so easy to customize a basic letter. That graduate should have learned to insert into the letter a description of the specific present you gave and a kind word that would apply specifically to you.
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Judith Martin United Features Syndicate