Excuse me?
yawn
I honestly don’t know how to beat last week’s blog. Thanks to everyone who commented. I’m glad it had such an effect. However, in the interests of continuity, I’m going to pretend it was a season of Dallas: “Wow. That was an incredibly vivid dream! Everyone loved my blog. Oh Gods, I’m late for work!”
The PTB (Powers That Be, not Psycho Teddy Bear) beamed an incredibly vivid dream into my head last night. Completely different from anything I’ve dreamt in years. In it, I was in a massive house and. . . did you just yawn? I can’t believe you just yawned! That’s incredibly rude!
Is it? Apparently. I was at a student radio session this morning and the local radio guy was making comments on how the boys had performed during the show. He kept picking up on the fact that one of the boys was yawning. “You shouldn’t yawn in public. If you have to yawn, cover your mouth. It’s extremely bad manners!” I don’t know. Yes, it’s bad manners, but is it extreme? And should there be some allowance made for the fact that it’s only eight in the morning and we’ve all been up since five? But why am I defending the lad? Manners have gone completely out the window since my day!
Gods I feel old.
Call it Manners Evolution. What was completely inappropriate when I was a teenager is now commonplace. And it might be family based, or region based, but I’m surprised at some of the behaviours students and strangers don’t consider to be even mildly rude. For example, mealtimes were always sacred. You wouldn’t answer the phone at dinner time, and the world didn’t end. This was before mobile phones (cell phones for the weirdo foreigners – sorry, was that rude?) but the concept remains the same. Unless you’re an on-call professional or worried parent, there is no reason to answer a phone during a meal. Don’t even get me started on people who have the phone on the table throughout the entire meal, or those who hold text conversations during dinner!
Aside from dinner, mobile phones in themselves are a curse of modern society and something we just have to get used to. I personally love listening to other people talk loudly about their medical conditions and secret affairs on the number 55 tram into the city. Gives me something to write about. So by all means, keep it up. If I attempt to strangle you with my headphone cord, it just means you’re either a) boring, or b) severely limiting my ability to concentrate on the book I’m reading.
My fiancé’s bugbear is road rage. Vans and urban 4WD lunatics in particular. I love watching tiny angry people in massive vehicles taking out their frustration on other drivers by tailgating – nay, LOOMING OVER – their victims. It’s like BattleTech. Inside the “safety” of their giant robots they feel invincible. If I can’t see the wheels of the driver behind me, I slow down until they either get the message or get out from behind me. I’M TAKING BACK THE ROAD PEOPLE!
I actually enjoyed a column by Andrew Bolt where he talked about manners and basic common sense. Of course, he was leading up to the fact that if you are a teacher, you really shouldn’t make porn videos with ex-students and allow them to be leaked online. By “allow” I mean “don’t put a password on your phone so that anyone can steal it and copy the files onto their own drives”. But his initial comment was that we now need signs in the toilets of businesses telling us not only to wash our hands after going to the toilet, but how. He goes on to say that once upon a time, it was a sackable offence for a teacher to be caught gambling. I’m not sure what you have to do to get sacked now, but apparently, making porn doesn’t count.
I’ve been wracking my mind the entire time I’ve been writing this trying to remember why I wanted to write about manners in the first place. I’ve finally remembered and can now stop waffling.
When did it become ok for individuals to start eating at restaurants before all of the meals come out? More importantly, when did restaurants start to think that it was acceptable practise to bring meals out staggered over the course of ten-twenty minutes? It used to be that meals for a table were kept in a warmer, or prepared so that they all came out at once. If one person at a table hadn’t received their meal, it was because the waiter didn’t have enough hands. For the last few restaurant meals I’ve experienced, the arrival of main meals has been almost random. I’m naming names here, because I really like Thai Nee Café on Lygon, but our last couple of meals there have not been pleasant experiences.
It is most definitely ok for diners to tell their companions to “start without me, it’ll get cold”. It’s the choice of the diner, and shows consideration to the others in his or her party. It is most definitely NOT ok for restaurants to take that as complicity in the seemingly standard practise of not serving an entire table at once.
Pick up your game, restaurants. Manners still matter. People shouldn’t have to choose between a cold meal and a cold shoulder.
Now excuse me, I have a commuter to strangle.
Finding Damo 