Modern manners go out the window

BAD manners are becoming worse, and more commonplace.

Salt illo

DO you know what I can't stand? Bad manners, especially in people who should know better. At the upper echelon of business, for example, there are some people who do not return phone calls. It's a power kick.

You call and leave a message and they decide whether to speak to you. And if they determine you are of no use to them your call is ignored. You learn gradually, painfully, during the next 24 hours, that you have been dismissed: go away and don't come back until you are vaguely interesting.

Or how about when you are at an airline check-in desk and you ask about changing your flight and the attendant barely acknowledges your existence before putting his head down and beginning to type. And type. And all done without saying a word. How about saying hello? How about saying: "I'm just searching availability"? How about keeping me informed as to what is happening? How about acknowledging my existence?

What about when you are at a drinks function and people are gathered in tight circles so that anyone unknown to the group is excluded? Or how about when you do speak to someone at a drinks function and they look beyond you for more interesting people to chat to? Or does this only happen to me because I am the most boring person in the world?

Or how about in economy class on planes (yes, I travel economy) when the person in front pushes their seat back without so much as an "excuse me" or "do you mind?".

Why is it that I cannot do any of these things? I cannot but return a phone call even if it takes a day to find the time. I cannot push my seat back in a plane without turning and saying "do you mind" to the person behind. I cannot chat in a tight circle of business people and not include someone who obviously doesn't know anyone. Why can't I do any of this? I'll tell you why. It's because I have decided that I am the only normal person on this planet.

OK, so you are normal, too. That makes two of us out of seven billion people. Everyone else is rude and selfish and, frankly, should have been taught better manners when they were growing up. But this isn't the end of it.

Bad manners reach their zenith at the dinner table. I have been at enough lunches and dinners to know that even the most sophisticated people don't seem to know how to hold a knife and fork. Fingers should not touch the fork's tines or the back of the knife's blade. You should not speak to just one person for the entire meal. Speak to the person at your left during entree and to the person at your right during mains.

How about when you are at a dinner on a rectangular table and you have the end seat? If the person in the second-last seat doesn't engage with you then you are left sitting like a shag on a rock with no one to talk to. Doesn't the second-last seated person see this?

Why is it that I see a moral and ethical duty to include such people cut off by table geography from the rest of the conversation?

On the issue of bad table manners could I just say that there is a special category for Americans. I do not like, but I understand and accept their unusual custom of using the fork like a shovel. A shovel!

What I cannot stand is the way they, and increasingly some Australians, eat fast food: in the street, on the go, with an open-mouthed chewing action. If you can bear to look you can actually see food rolling around like the inside of a cement mixer! And I haven't even got on to the subject of gum-chewing or disgusting personal habits such as sniffing.

Do serial sniffers think that no one can hear them? Not only can I hear you, Mr Serial Sniffer, but it takes my entire willpower not to offer you a box of tissues and tell you to please blow your nose. In the middle of a business meeting!

If you, like me, are one of the rare people who see flaws like this everywhere then I invite you to join me in my newly formed Society for Normal People. For it is only we, at the society, who seem to appreciate the value of good manners.

KPMG Partner Bernard Salt is the author of The Big Tilt.

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