ought to be some ungainly banter. ‘Hi, how are you?’ isn’t enough. Revel in the ghastliness. Expect nothing more than clichés and discomfort. Alternatives might well be condemned as ‘slick’ and ‘artificial’, anyway. Don’t forget that there’s always the chance of something better…romance, perhaps.
It is perfectly all right for one of you to take the initiative in saying goodbye, but a tendency is creeping in for this to be done in a practised and ‘professional’ manner – more a matter of tone than what is said. It is best if you can remain as bumbling and ill at ease as possible. Ideally, there should be several attempts to part, with conversation spluttering to life again in between.
Neighbours
Have the soap operas, particularly the one of this section’s name, put people off being neighbourly? If you start speaking to the neighbours you will certainly end up sleeping with most of them and marrying quite a few. Rumours about your sexuality will start flying around and you’ll have to do some more sleeping around to prove the contrary. Roughly every four years you will be the victim of a con man. In the years when you are not a victim of a con man one of the following will be bound to happen: you will be wrongly accused of either murder or major fraud, never both; your house will burn down; you will trip over a paving stone and successfully sue the council; you will disappear overseas, never to be heard of again.
It’s neighbourly where Matt lives, in a nice new-build in Peterborough. At Christmas time, they’re in and out of each other’s houses, having drinks; the mothers share the school run and there’s a summer party. But elsewhere it’s a different story. ‘Some years ago, I was struggling to get a bag of manure in and a neighbour rushed out of his house to help me,’ says Mrs Gibbs, who lives in one of a row of Victorian cottages in Winchester. ‘But whenever I’ve seen that man subsequently – not a flicker. I seem to have become invisible.’
People are peculiar. There have been other cases of neighbours steadfastly refusing to pop next door for a cup of tea or even a meal, possibly because their own house is a tip and they dread having to ask back. In other cases, hospitality is accepted but never returned. Some people avoid their neighbours on principle, dreading being stuck with them if they so much as exchange a word.
Zoe’s street in Balham is not very neighbourly but this may be to do with her habit of putting the rubbish out on the wrong day. There’s also the matter of her noisy parties…
‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ – neighbourliness is more than good manners, it is a virtue, a mark of goodness.
It doesn’t matter if your neighbours are dull or even a nuisance – they are your neighbours. You have something in common.
Don’t shun your neighbours out of mean-spiritedness – jealousy over their decor, dread of having to ask back, fear of being lumbered. This is nonsense.
If you accept hospitality from your neighbours, which you should, don’t forget to ask them back (see Do we dare to ask them back?, page 132).
Ignoring your neighbours or, even worse, ignoring them after you have spoken once or twice, is unkind and hostile. They will assume that they have given offence or that you look down on them in some way. They will be hurt.
Noise is a serious business. Loud music, banging doors, shouting etc. can cause real distress. There is the thing itself but also the feeling of being trampled all over, not shown any consideration, as well as the anxiety over whether it’s ever going to stop.
Respond readily to any requests to make less noise.
If you are planning a party with music, check with neighbours well in advance (‘We hope you won’t mind’ etc.) and give them accurate information about how long you are proposing to play music for. Invite them to the party.
The laying of flowers
Many shrines are seen by the wayside now. People lay flowers at the scenes of fatal accidents. Elsewhere, tributes are left in spots special in some way to a departed loved one or at the scenes of murders. Mrs Gibbs is suspicious. ‘My friend lives at a beauty spot in Devon. People leave flowers but they never come and clear them away when they’re over, and often they leave the plastic wrapping on. I’m also rather against the whole thing, I’m sorry to say. It’s not terribly encouraging, at my age, having all these reminders of death all over the place. And some of these roadside shrines – they go on and on, don’t they?’
If you are laying flowers in a public place, remove the plastic wrapping. Return to take away the dead flowers.
Permanent shrines are hard on the living, especially if beside roads or near houses. After six months they should be removed. Thereafter, they can be resurrected on the anniversary of the death that occurred there, provided that the flowers are removed when dead.
What are work manners?
A lot of people loathe automatic answering services (‘Please choose from the following eighteen options’) or shops where the assistants are more interested in choosing the next CD track than serving the customers. But what might look like bad manners is really bad business. There was an absurd clothes shop in London called Voyage that, rudely, wouldn’t let just anyone in. You had to be invited. Quite rightly, it went out of business.
Equally, good manners at work can be skin deep – adopted, often after going on a course of some kind, simply for personal advancement. Why has so-and-so suddenly started offering to help the boss’s PA with the flowers for the foyer? Or taken to making a sympathy call every time the MD is ill?
Here we look at manners that have nothing to with success or failure at work. These manners, when adopted, just make the workplace a better place to be.
Greetings
In ordinary life, deliberately ignoring someone you know, ‘blanking’ them, is a devastating act of full-scale hostility. But at work, so some people think, it’s a feather in your cap. ‘Look at me,’ they seem to say as they stump by, busy, busy, without a glimmer of recognition, ‘I’m so useful and important I’ve not got a moment to spare.’ This is what it’s like at Matt’s office – grim. People have got their heads down, they’re far too busy wondering how many column inches to devote to innovations in gear-box design on dumper trucks. They couldn’t possibly say hello. Zoe does at least say hi to the people of her own age in her PR agency, but strangely has no greeting for her managing director when she goes into her office to tell her how well she’s getting on with some new press contact.
Nothing is more dismal than a workplace where people don’t greet each other.
Greet people the first time you see them that day (however late it is) and before you launch into whatever business you have.
Senior staff often suffer the most from lack of being greeted.
Holding the door open
Endless fire doors in offices have created a manners
