Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck

by Amy Alkon

We’re experiencing more rudeness because we’ve lost the constraints on our behavior that we’ve had in place for millions of years. We didn’t evolve to be around strangers and aren’t psychologically equipped to live in a world filled with them, yet that’s exactly how we’re living—in vast strangeropolises, where it’s possible to go an entire day or days without running into anybody we know.

Perhaps more important, by calling somebody on their rotten treatment of you, you become a person who refuses to take crap from people, bolstering your dignity in your own eyes. You can’t always stop people from kicking you when you’re down, but you don’t have to roll over for them so they can land better blows.

“No” was not a word (or attitude) that came naturally to me. In fact, I think one of my greatest accomplishments was becoming kind of a bitch. Not all the time but when called for.

When one of these spitebags hurls a put-down at you, they expect that you’ll either try to fight back or just stand there blinking and wishing you could disappear. Instead, you should do the last thing they’d expect: Look straight at them for a moment, and coolly call them on their rottenness with a remark like “Clearly, you must

have had a pretty bad day to feel the need to say something so nasty to me. I hope you feel better.” (Sincerity is not required here—just believability—so say it devoid of anger, and sound like you mean it.) By expressing sympathy for them, you’ve accomplished three things: 1. You’ve refused to accept their turning you into their victim. 2. You’ve come off classy and bigger than they are. 3. You still managed to stick it to them, sending the message, “Sorry your life is such a suckhole that your lone path to happiness is trying to make other people feel like shit.”

Modern telephone technology has transformed our lives in incredible ways and in some pretty sucky ones. The average American thirteen-year-old now has a small gadget in his pocket with more computing power than NASA used to put the first man on the moon.

Voicemail should not be treated as a content delivery system. A voicemail kidnaps the recipient’s time for as long as it takes to hear that rambling message you left, assuming they don’t rebel and delete it halfway through. (My friend Jackie Danicki refuses to listen to any voicemail longer than a minute and often deletes them in the first ten seconds if they lack promise.) If you must speak your piece—like when your doctor’s office needs your insurance card number and your call goes to her receptionist’s voicemail—do your best to keep it snappy. But, otherwise, unless somebody’s told you that they like or prefer voicemail, consider hanging up and texting or e-mailing them instead of rambling on: “Hi, it’s Amy. I was just sitting here having Jell-O, petting my dog, and watching Ultimate Fight Club and thought of you…”

As I wrote in my advice column, answering the phone while at a restaurant with a date is the digital version of deserting your dining companion and bopping over to sit with friends across the restaurant. Texting? In old-school terms, it’s like whipping out a pen and legal pad and saying to your date, “You busy yourself with that pork chop, sweetcheeks. Got a couple letters I gotta mail out first thing.”

As I noted in that column, “if you’re going to invite somebody to dinner and ignore them, at least have the decency to get married first and build up years of bitterness and resentment.”

The difference between an asshole and an unfortunately busy person is often a tiny bit of information—for example, responding to an e-mail with “Got this. Swamped. Will respond as soon as humanly possible.”

If you are a frail 9,000-year-old lady or you just had your knee replaced with four steel pins and sixteen thumbtacks and you lack a handicapped placard for your car, you get a pass for waiting for a primo parking space near the door of the drugstore. Otherwise, you don’t get to back up traffic behind you while you wait—and wait and wait—for some other car to pull out, you lazy cow.

So, what should you say when a friend tells you they have cancer or some other horrible disease? “I know you can do this,” meaning, “I know you, and I know that whatever comes, you will deal with it.” Don’t say “you’ll be fine,” since you don’t know that they will be. —Cancer patient Jeanne Sather, assertivecancerpatient.com “I’m so sorry this is happening. It could happen to any of us. Life is so unfair sometimes.” This helps remove the blame or shame that people with cancer sometimes feel. —Cancer survivor Lori Hope, author of Help Me Live: 20 Things People with Cancer Want You to Know “You’re very strong. I can’t believe cancer would be dumb enough to try to go after you.” What I wish I’d said to my late friend Cathy Seipp.

The essence of empathy is the ability to stand in another’s shoes, to feel what it’s like there and to care about making it better if it hurts.