Try Toleration, Cooperation With Rules

Dear Miss Manners: As one of the many drones now working in an office cubicle situation - or a “cube farm, “ as we call it - I am wondering if you could address the uncharted territory of Cube Farm Etiquette.

Cube farms offer the illusion of privacy without the thing itself. To wit:

Is it rude to attend to personal grooming (e.g., nail clipping) in your cube since others can hear? What about personal phone calls? Are your co-workers supposed to pretend they can’t hear you? What about playing music over your computer’s speakers? Using your speakerphone? Is it impolite to tell coworkers engaged in social conversation nearby that they’re distracting you?

Is it impolite to read your co-worker’s computer screen when you stop by to visit?

Why is it that people who wouldn’t dream of rifling through someone’s desk feel free to poke around in a cube? How do you avoid startling your co-workers, who, when facing their computers, tend to have their backs to the entrance?

As you can see, most of these questions relate to degrees of sensitivity - that is, some employees are more sensitive than others to the sounds around them. From a slightly different perspective, some employees (sometimes the same employees!) seem completely oblivious to the fact that everyone can hear what they’re saying (or doing) in their cube, no matter how embarrassing or vulgar it is.

Your guidance, please. I shall post your answer in the office kitchen.

Gentle Reader: Below the sign that says “Wash your cup/Don’t leave grounds in sink/Throw out your trash/If you finish the coffee, please make another pot”?

The underlying principle of that, which is applicable to all the situations you describe, can be stated as: Look, we’re all jammed in here together, so let’s try not to get on one another’s nerves.

As you say, nerves are funny. One person is driven crazy by the sound of a nail clipper, and another never learned to trust the telephone system to provide its own amplification.

So rules are needed. Some of them are specific rules about behavior that is universally annoying. Where there is no privacy, people are required to create it by knocking on whatever passes for a door and pretending not to have registered the content of overheard conversation, and refraining from snooping.

Then there is the most important rule, the one that should be posted in the kitchen: “Rules are not enough. Toleration and cooperation also required.”

Dear Miss Manners: Will you explain restaurant serving - every boss has a different method and we’re depending on you. We’re going crazy.

OK - serve from right, pick up from left, or serve from left and pick up from right?

Gentle Reader: Sit down, please, and take it easy.

Miss Manners does not say that because she hopes to take your mind off the problem, nor because she considers it an insignificant one. She expects all those bosses to sit up and pay attention as well. Being boss may confer power, but it doesn’t include being allowed to make up one’s own etiquette rules.

The correct answer is: Serve from the left, and pick up from the right. If you are sitting down as instructed, imagine that you are being offered a platter from which you must serve yourself.

If you are offered food from a platter when you are sitting at table, you will find that your left arm is pinned to your side, but your right arm is free to scoop up the food. Now try the other side.

All right, so you’re left-handed, and hardly any restaurants still offer platters. Never mind, the tradition has persisted, and that’s still the way to remember it.