The war against rudeness

I have a fantasy that little Anne Frank is in the loft in Amsterdam. She has only has one email address and has been frantically emailing the customer service department of a major bank. Which bank? A major bank. She is desperate. “Quickly,” she writes, “the Germans will be here soon.” Unfortunately for Anne she sent her emails to the ‘Who Gives A Fat Rats Department’.

Some HR recruitment companies have gone one step further and added an automatic responder message when candidates apply for a job which reads, ‘if you don’t hear back from us in three weeks, you didn’t get the job.’

What sort of corporate ethos allows that sort of statement? Let me decode that for you: ‘you won’t hear back from us, it’s because we’re arrogant, lazy bastards who don’t give a fig … but please apply again to be insulted by us anew.’

I’m old enough to remember when people wrote a note in cursive with a pen on paper to thank a staff member for doing a good job. People used the telephone to thank the host for a convivial night at a dinner party. Now people don’t write with ink – and it appears they have trouble returning emails too. Rudeness rules.

I was taught as a child boarder at Prince Alfred College in Adelaide (about one million years ago), that 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 the main meal. It seems crazy I know, but when I’m at a function where I don’t know a soul, that’s what I do.

Why do I remember this 30 years later? It’s because it was drilled in to me. That, and never play across the line in cricket.

Of course there is a place for silence. It is an oxymoron. The power of silence in relationships, business and politics works to achieve communication. We need to fill anticipatory silence with the sounds of our voices. Our voices are punctuated by silence. There is no place for unresponsiveness.

I am starting to sound like one of those old whining boomers on TV who bitch about the state of the world. Not so. I like the world and all in it. But if you try to treat me like Clementis, I’ll come calling in person.