Reader Response, Vol. 5, Issue 21

Finally we are passed Memorial Day, and Etiquetteer knows you are all happily wearing white with Perfect Propriety. As you see, Etiquetteer has made the switch, too! Etiquetteer has taken a bit of flak over a recent column about how to deal with talkative strangers: Shame on you! Old people rarely get the company they deserve. I remember meeting an elderly gentleman on a streetcar in San Francisco. He said he rode it all day just to have something to do and if anybody talked to him, that just made it a great day. That man next to you was probably talking about your salad because that was all he knew the two of you had in common. Isn't there a compromise somewhere where you could eat and this man could get a little human communication? Etiquetteer responds: Etiquetteer is not questioning why that nice old man was talking about the Cobb salad, or indeed the issue of lonely old people wandering cities across our nation looking for human interaction. But do you have any understanding of how difficult it is to eat food while people are talking about it? While wishing this old gentleman no ill will, Etiquetteer must sympathize with those who have only a limited time for lunch to get away from the stresses of the workday. And if this means you class Etiquetteer along with murderously self-absorbed Waldo Lydecker, well, so be it. Do you have any suggestions for how one might extricate oneself from such a chatterbox before reaching the point of rudeness? Something along the lines of “I’ve enjoyed listening to you. I’m going to return to my book now; this is one of the few times that I get the chance to read, and I do so enjoy it.” I recognize that chatters exist (my honey is one, and being a non-chatter myself, I appreciate the pressure it takes off me at parties to be verbal) but in my experience, many chatters chat because they are lonely and looking for any sort of human connection. In your examples the train platform lady is probably the latter. I ran into a lot of lonely people (mostly senior citizens) in my first job as a high school student, working in a pharmacy and occasionally delivering prescriptions. I was not very good at tearing myself away, and frequently had to explain to my boss why I'd been gone so long. A good method for extricating oneself from these situations is appreciated. Etiquetteer responds: Really, you just provided it. Your little speech suits the purpose almost to the point of courtliness. Etiquetteer could only add “Won’t you excuse me please?” to make it Perfectly Proper. As a delivery boy you can always say “Sorry, they keep me on a tight schedule and I can’t get in trouble.”