The death of common courtesy.
There was certain etiquette you were taught as a boy and then as a young man that was just plain a given:
• Holding the door open for a woman, be it a dwelling or a car.
• Taking your hat off when entering a house.
• Standing when a woman gets up from or returns to a dinner table.
• Addressing someone directly when you talk to them.
• Saying “God bless you” after someone sneezes.
• Waiting until everyone has received their meal until starting.
• No cursing around women.
I’m still a young man, but over the years some of these guidelines have just plain disappeared. Kids routinely wear baseball caps inside homes, many times at the dinner table. Cursing around women is pretty standard. Holding a door seems optional.
What does get my goat these days is rudeness. Yes, I know I’ve created a blog where I encourage profane rudeness and aggressive comments, but this is cyberspace. I don’t really know you, you don’t really know me. It is, as the title suggests, Verbal Paintball. You may get hit, but it’s not permanent damage. In everyday life, I’d either hold the door for you or be generally courteous (as long as I received the same in return).
When I was younger I used work as a deli clerk in a supermarket. Every now and then, we would get a customer who felt the need to project the ugliness of his misery on you. Sometimes it would be in nasty complaints about the thickness or thinness of his Virginia ham, other times it would be a cursing rant over why the German potato salad had too much oil in it. As a clerk you had to be polite and take it. One of my greatest joys came one day when I was a customer at that same deli section and the person in front of me was berating one of my co-workers who was on duty that day. This arrogant bastard felt my wrath; I told him these clerks are there to serve him and his rudeness was unacceptable.
Well, not quite that way. More like, “Hey, asshole! Who the fuck do you think you are? You want an order, make your damn order politely and shut the hell up! You want to be rude little dickhead, go somewhere else! She’s not standing there serving you to listen to you sound like a fucking prick!”
I was a bit taller than him, which helped - and he backed down and shut up.
Today, my pet peeve are people who can’t turn their fucking cellphones off long enough to treat people behind the counter with some respect. You want to place an order? Shut the fucking phone off! You’re not dealing with an animal here, you’ve got a person in front of you. Treat them with the same respect you’d damn well expect for yourself.
These are, of course, the same people who talk the loudest on their precious phones in the commuter trains, disrupting the calm most commuters would like at the end of the day. Instead, these pricks are talking loudly and having important conversations that can’t possibly wait, ike what’s for dinner.
Fuck you. I’ll tell you what’s for dinner. It’s a cellphone shoved way up your ass followed by a quick fist in the face? Still hungry?
