Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (25 page)

Nose hairs are burning.

As Emma Lazarus pointed out in that poem on the Statue of Liberty, the huddled masses are yearning to breathe free. This is especially true of those packed into coach like shrink-wrapped cocktail wieners. Ease their suffering by bathing before flying, and not in cologne. Besides the fact that it’s unpleasant for anyone with a working set of nostrils, some people have these crazy fragrance allergies. Forgoing the Axe the day you fly (and not applying that stinky, perfumed lotion on the plane) will allow the allergic to enjoy special little in-flight perks like continuing to breathe.

While you’re on the plane, don’t be waving your smellier parts around. There are places your stinky-ass bare feet belong, like in a cool stream in the country. Places they do not belong include the bulkhead wall, the seat back, and, horrors, the armrest of the person seated in front of you. (
P.S.
Lightly covering your stinky-ass bare foot in an acrylic sock doesn’t make it any more party-ready for the elbow of another passenger.)

Take care not to bring smelly things on the plane. It’s understandable that you don’t want to fork over 6 or 7 bucks to the flight attendant for crackers and a wedge of “cheese food,” but the people seated around you likewise don’t want to spend four hours smelling airport food court Thai. Maybe work a compromise and score yourself a ham sandwich instead?

Applying or removing nail polish is one of the rudest things you can do in an enclosed space like an airplane cabin—basically gassing everyone in a dozen or more rows in front of and behind you with toxic fumes. A woman (or mannerless drag queen) doing this should immediately be told to stop by as many passengers as possible if a flight attendant isn’t immediately available to scold her. Of course, if life were fair, she would subsequently be dragged from her seat and be given a swirly in the airplane toilet. Suggested musical accompaniment: “Blue Bayou.”

If you’re a farter, kindly plan ahead. Here’s a little secret known to low-carbers like me: Carbohydrates—sugar, flour, starchy vegetables like potatoes, and anything sweet, including fruit—cause gas. Eat none before flying and you will likely be gas-free on the plane. Maybe consider the day of your flight the first day of your low-carb diet? Your cardiologist will thank you—as will anybody who’d otherwise be trapped on a packed plane with your nonstop ass-bombs.

Potty politics

Be mindful of the places your butt does not belong while waiting for the toilet:

1. The flight attendant’s face as she’s seated on the jump seat trying to eat her lunch.

2. Other passengers’ faces.

If the laws of physics dictate that some part of your lower extremities
must
go in somebody’s face, crotch is preferable to ass.

Spawn on a plane

There’s something to be said for snakes on a plane: They’re quiet. Your kids are more likely to be if, when flying, you occupy them with more than your wagging finger and
“Shhh!”

When my supermom neighbor flies with her kids, she operates under the assumption that there will be no one but her to meet their needs (packing their carry-ons as if there will be nothing to eat and the video screens will be broken or the movie will be just this side of porn). She brings DVDs, iPods loaded with games, books, puzzles, paper and pencils, new little toys, and a new comic book or sticker book for each child. She packs sucking candies for the ear pressure and fresh clothes in case of spills. She preps the kids with naps so they won’t be tired and cranky and finds that “a bag of cookies goes a long way toward buying quiet.”

If you’re taking your kids on a plane, be mindful of this weird partial deafness some parents develop, allowing them to ignore shrieks by their children that could shatter the plate glass in an entire block of storefronts. Should one of your children start wailing or babbling the same phrase over and over, other passengers will be less enraged if you appear more concerned with stopping them than with continuing to read your magazine. You might even mouth “Sorry!” to those around you while trying to quiet your kid or take her into one of the bathrooms and try to calm her down. Any show of consideration actually goes a long way in eliciting generosity of spirit from other passengers. Of course, offering to buy a drink for everyone in your immediate vicinity will go even further.

If it “takes a village,” maybe that’s where you should leave your screaming-prone children.

I can guess what you’re thinking: “Hey, Cranky, weren’t you young once?” Sure I was, but until my parents were sure I could sit for four hours on a plane without blowing out other people’s eardrums with my screams, they limited my air travel to any place I could get to by vigorously flapping my arms.

I know … since I am not a parent, I cannot
possibly
understand how hard it is to keep a child from acting out. And I do hear claims that some children are prone to tantrums no matter how exquisitely they are parented. If this describes your child, there’s a solution, and it isn’t plopping him down in a crowded metal tube with hundreds of other people who cannot escape his screams, except by throwing themselves to their death at 30,000 feet.

Granted, there sometimes are extenuating circumstances—reasons a parent and their little hellraiser simply
must
take a plane. Well, actually, there are two:

1. Dire family emergency. (Granny’s actually dying, not just dying to see the kid.)

2. The wee screamer is urgently in need of a liver transplant that, for some reason, can only take place on the opposite side of the country.

In all other cases, if there’s any chance your child is still in the feral stage, pop Granny on a flight or gas up the old minivan for your next vacation. It really does come down to this: Your right to bring your screaming child on a plane ends where the rest of our ears begin.

Julia Child,
the warm, welcoming late chef and culinary camp counselor to millions, called dining with one’s friends and beloved family “one of life’s most primal and innocent delights.”

Ever the realist, Child also noted that “every kitchen” should have a blowtorch.
⁴⁵
The imposing
whoosh
of the host’s turning it on and the sight of a strong and uninterrupted flame can bring one’s guests to their senses when other primal urges come out—those that cause one brother to chase the other around the dining table with a carving knife.

To be fair, Child was most likely thinking of singeing off any remaining feathers from a plucked chicken or making those little hardened-sugar ice-skating rinks atop crème brûlée. But eating, drinking, and socializing often highlight (and even bring out) the worst in people, from outlandish cheapness to cross-table insult-hurling to the occasional murder-suicide. As excellent as a blowtorch can be for halting a felony in progress, to prevent some of the smaller crimes and repulsivities at the dinner table—and bars, restaurants, and parties—there’s the rest of this chapter.

*

On the off chance you were raised in the wilderness by a family of coyotes, I’ll touch briefly on the essentials of at-the-table etiquette.

1. Wait for everyone to be served before you start eating. Try to come off more like someone who’s eaten a meal or two in his lifetime than like a feral hog loose in HomeTown Buffet.

2. Chew with your mouth closed. The view from across the table should not be the same as the view from your esophagus.

3. Put your silverware down between bites. Clutching your knife and fork in your fists throughout the meal makes you look like one of those oafish guys in some B movie about the Middle Ages.

4. Talking while chewing is not like juggling while riding a unicycle. Nobody will be excited that you can do both at the same time.

5. Coyotes lick their paws while eating for good reason—because animals that die on the side of the road rarely do so next to place settings complete with a napkin.

6. If you want some item located across the table, ask, “Could you please pass…?”; don’t knock over two drinks and bloody the nose of the person next to you while stretching for it.

7. You can try somebody’s food—if they offer you a taste. Extend your bread plate to receive it instead of reaching over and sending your fork (or, worse, your fingers) souvenir hunting on their plate.

8. Like hostages held by terrorists, some gristly bit you’ve put in your mouth may require an extraction. Put your napkin to your mouth, smuggle the offending inedible into it, and either keep it hidden there or, when nobody’s looking, tuck it under something on your plate.

9. If you don’t know what to do with some exotic utensil, wait for somebody else to do something with it and hope they aren’t just too drunk to care.

10. Avoid licking your plate clean unless there’s a power outage or you’re dining with the blind.

People put a lot of emphasis on table manners, which can be acquired or polished with fifteen minutes of googling, but most of the conflicts that lead to hard feelings in social situations have nothing to do with how you pilot a fork. As in other areas of our lives, rudeness in eating, drinking, and socializing almost always comes down to a failure in empathy—neglecting to consider how our behavior will affect others. The lack of empathy is apparent when a supposed friend doesn’t bother to respond to your party invitation, but it’s also what allows some guy to do that big honking nose-blow right at his table in the middle of Applebee’s. The thought he never considers:
Gee, wonder whether the sound of my high-velocity snot ejection might gross out other diners.

And take the wealthy woman who’s secretly cheap. (We’ll call her Jane Dough.) She dines out at fancy restaurants like it’s her birthright but always comes up with creative justifications for docking the waitress on her tip when the service wasn’t actually lacking. It seems that Jane, despite all her money, has some fears about running out of the stuff and likes to cut corners in her spending where she can get away with it. Well, she wouldn’t be the first person to have a pang at parting with a dollar, but not everyone sees merely having a pang as reason to follow it wherever it leads. What enables Jane’s chronic undertipping is a lack of empathy, which allows her to avoid any inconvenient thoughts of the waitress as a person and the panic she’ll feel when she can’t pay her electric bill.

TIPPING: PART OF THE TRUE COST OF GOING OUT

Tipping is the area we have more quandaries about than any other sphere of going out, perhaps because our tipping behaviors are about as far away from rational economics as we can get. Take, for example, the way most people tend to tip the same percentage—15 percent (or, increasingly, 20 percent)—whether they’re eating cheap or fancy. This means that the waitress at Denny’s will get, say, 43 cents for bringing you your plate of food, while the waitress at SnootyAss Bistro will get, oh, $14. Did the SnootyAss waitress really smile $13.57 more broadly when she delivered your order?

Why we
think
we tip and why we actually tip

Most people will tell you they decide how much tip to leave based on the quality of the waiter or waitress’s service. The truth is, some actually do, but a whole lot just believe they do. We like to believe we do things for good reasons, but a good deal of social psychology research finds that we’re often poor judges of what motivates our behavior. The relationship between the quality of service and the size of the tip diners leave is actually extremely weak, according to the research of Cornell University social psychologist Michael Lynn, a former Pizza Hut waiter and the author or co-author of over fifty papers on tipping.

Lynn acknowledged to me that customers who get better service do tend to tip better, “but not much better.” In fact, his research finds that on average, only 2 to 4 percent
⁴⁶
of the variation in tip size is explained by the customer’s assessment of the quality of the service (like server attentiveness, promptness, and knowledgeability). For example, people will often tip a higher percentage on a lower bill. In fact, when I asked Lynn what he typically tips, he told me that he normally leaves 20 percent on a restaurant check at an upscale establishment, but when he goes to his local diner and gets a $10 check, he’ll leave $15 total—a 50 percent gratuity. No, the waitress doesn’t deliver a happy ending with his hash browns. “I know the servers. I really like them. I show up there a lot,” he told me.

As for some of the subconscious influences on tip size, if you’re male, you’re likely to tip bigger if your waitress is blond, wearing red lipstick, wearing a red dress, and/or wearing a flower in her hair, according to research by French behavioral scientist Nicolas Gueguen. Other research finds that many customers leave bigger tips when a server does little things that seem to invite or reflect a familiar relationship between themselves and the customers. For example, in a study by experimental psychology student Kimberly Garrity, a waitress serving Sunday brunch got 23 percent more in tips when she introduced herself by name. Squatting down by the table—coming down to the customer’s level and making the conversation seem more intimate—increased the size of the tip by 20 percent for a waiter and 25 percent for a waitress, per research by Michael Lynn and Kirby Mynier. Giving out mints or chocolates with the check—even just Hershey’s Miniatures—has also been shown to significantly increase the tip, perhaps because giving a gift tends to trigger feelings of obligation to reciprocate.

But Lynn says his research suggests that the single biggest factor beyond check size in the amount tipped is a desire to “buy social approval” (including that of the server) by complying with tipping norms: to tip at least 15 percent of the bill, before tax, and perhaps 20 percent, which Lynn finds is increasingly being considered the minimum standard. Other factors that increase the tip size include discomfort about social inequity—having somebody running around and doing our bidding while we’re sitting back like pashas.