Apologize Then Consider Leaving Town

Dear Miss Manners: During a friend’s wedding reception, there was a great deal of wild dancing, in the course of which I allegedly bled all over the bride’s white satin dress.

Though I have no recollection of this having happened, I nonetheless am mortified. I can’t help thinking that bleeding on the bridal gown must be very bad luck, or at best a social faux pas.

I would like to know what, if anything, blood on the bridal gown may signify and whether or not there is some redemptive act that I can perform. I am generally not a superstitious person, but the gravity of this set of symbols has me worried.

How can I make things right?

Gentle Reader: Depends on the blood type.

Superstitions are like that. Surely you didn’t think that etiquette was so finicky as to have a general rule against getting drunk out of your skull and making a mess all over the bride.

It was, indeed, that lady’s bad luck to have you there. But neither is Miss Manners quite so amused at this as you might have hoped.

Nevertheless, she wants to help you to make things right. It will take time, she is afraid. An abject apology to your friends would be a start; after that, you might want to consider leaving town, changing your name and taking up a life of service to the poor.

Dear Miss Manners: I have a friend who is so cheap that every time she wants to call me, she pages me on my 800 number pager so I will call her back and she won’t have to pay for a toll call.

Of course she didn’t tell me that, but I figured it out after it happened so many times. Either that, or she would call my office very early in the morning and leave a message there on my answering machine to call her back, knowing that I would not be in the office and thereby minimizing her cost.

This is the same person who would hold up a line at the cashier in a restaurant just so she could calculate and make sure of the absolute way to benefit from a particular lunch special. I was so embarrassed to be with her that I have decided not to go out to eat with her any more.

Would it be rude for me to ignore her pager messages and her early morning messages? I did once, and next thing I knew, there was another early morning message asking me if everything was OK because she hadn’t heard from me.

Gentle Reader: Miss Manners wishes you would figure out another explanation. You know your friend better than she does - you could hardly know her less - but it hurts to think of a friendship in which the cost of annoying a friend is considered negligible.

Prudence in buying things is not comparable. Perhaps the lady could find a way to calculate her purchases without holding up the line, but it is not rude to want to save money. What is rude is accomplishing this by sticking a friend. If that is the case, it shows a callousness that might make you want to discontinue the friendship, which could easily be done by neglecting to return those calls.

A less drastic alternative is to tell your friend how sorry you are to keep missing her calls, but that the problem is your schedule: You never arrive at the office before nine, and you use your pager only for business and emergency calls, so it’s not a good way to reach you. Whether or not you believe it, the assumption that the timing of these calls is an accident is necessary for raising a polite objection to them.

Then if she persists, Miss Manners will accept your explanation. And if you persist in wanting the friendship, she suggests returning fewer and fewer calls and gently repeating your scheduling problem if she calls you on this, so to speak.