It's Always More Complicated

In my post about manners yesterday, conuly brought up in the comments a couple of posts to Ask A Manager from An Awful Young Man, who, on the evidence given, probably knows all the intricacies of cutlery and which way to pass the port, but is unfit for release into general society:

First post:

I was travelling home on a packed train with my bike. Suddently, I was approached by a lady who asked me, rather rudely, to give my seat to a man, her father, who was travelling with her. Since I was sitting on a regular seat (not a seat designated for disabled passangers) and had to read some materials to prepare for my interview, I ignored her. Unfortunately, when I was getting off the train, I accidentally moved my bike in a way that it caught and left dirty stains on her coat. I did not think much of this till the next day when I ran into the same woman and one of directors in the lift in my office building. It transpired that she is the CEO’s wife. She said nothing and did not acknowledge me, but it was very clear to me that she recognised me.

Second post:

I wish I had been told the receptionist/janitor/security guard story by career services at my university, which is one of those prestigious English ones. (Note from Alison: This is a reference to advice that you should be polite to receptionists/janitors/security guards when interviewing.) We get a lot of tips about how to write our resume and cover letter and how we should conduct ourselves during interviews, but not this type of real life recommendation.

But, my dearios, is this not a positively archetypal morality tale? At least one of the commenters pointed out its resemblance to Folktale Motif of Young Man on Quest who Fails to Help Old Woman, Bad Luck Eventuates/His Despised Younger Brother Does Help Her, Go Him, Wealth and Princess Are His Lot.

So there's that one.

It could also make a 'Sliding Doors' tale where the different outcomes of doing the wrong and right thing change destiny.

Or maybe he's condemned to repeat that journey and interview over and over again, Groundhog Day style, until he Learns His Lesson.

Or, maybe this is one of those novels that takes An Incident and does it from different viewpoints and that while to Mr I Am The Main Character here, this is all terribly important, there are other people who are going about their lives and barely noticing him unless they have to, and even then they have their own concerns.

Dept, vain adornment, sort of. Went to get my hair trimmed, as after several months since it was cropped it was getting a bit messy. I went back to the same place (not the one I used to go to in Bloomsbury, for Reasons including my favourite stylist doesn't seem to be there any longer) where the lady half of the operation does a very nice cut and it is not at all expensive.

I do wonder a bit though - it was entirely deserted except for me, and they wanted paying in cash. It may just be it was a quiet day and the cash card reader was broken. But one wonders if it's A FRONT for something, though pretty much every third business around there that's not an estate agent or a grocer's or fast food place of some ethnicity or other, this being a particularly multi-ethnic corner of Our Fair City, is a hairdresser's/barber's/beauty parlour.

***

Dept, this was RUDE: I don't care if he was young - ? primary school age - you do not do this on a London bus, infamy, infamy, etc. I was returning from the above appointment and the downstairs on the bus being rather chokka, went upstairs and scored the prime position, front seat, left-hand. And a stop or so later, little boy gets on and cheekily comes and sits next. Opposite - right hand - seat was empty and the whole top deck was by no means crowded.

Also he gave signs of being an incipient manspreader.

***

Dept of, further on sitting in the wrong place (I meant to add this to the post the other day on Being Inappropriate on Social Media): Tourists damage crystal-covered chair in Italian museum by sitting on it:

An Italian museum has contacted the police after two clumsy tourists almost wrecked a work of art while posing for photos.
Video footage released by Palazzo Maffei in Verona showed the hapless pair photographing each other pretending to sit on a crystal-covered chair made by the artist Nicola Bolla – described by the museum as an “extremely fragile” work.
The woman squats and does not seem to touch the work – called Van Gogh’s Chair and covered in Swarovski crystals – but the man is not so careful, sitting and then stumbling backwards as the seat buckles under his weight.
The pair can then be seen fleeing the room in footage that went viral over the weekend.

Given the date....

***

Infamous spam:

(I'm not even sure what this one is trying to do)

Appointment notice
Hello info,
I am instructed to inform you of your appointment as the funds administrator to your deceased relative estate. Kindly indicate your acceptance by providing your current Address & Direct Phone Number for immediate processing of the funds release to your control via the deceased bank directly.

At least the one informing me that my Amazon Prime subscription was due for renewal but whoops, the card needed renewing, was framed in a plausible mockup of an Amazon communication. Except, er, I don't have a Prime subscription, make considerable efforts to evade their upselling of same, and if I did inadvertently click the wrong button, would not be renewing.

***

Infamously intrusive 'friends' - reading this I just thought: RUDE.

Everyone is starting to guess how wealthy my fiance is

He really is very wealthy and not even my family knows the extent. I am not a kept woman by a long shot and we are not flashy. But a few of my very good old friends have asked me outright: ‘How much money does he actually have?’

So, I finally bit the bullet and ordered a new phone - and it was a model they alleged to have in stock, unlike my first choice which has been Out of Stock ever since I first looked -

- and after I have placed my order, included specifying delivery tomorrow late morning, I get a message saying oops sorry, out of stock, on reorder, will let you know.

CHIZ.

However, I can only blame my own careless negligence for the breaking of two dinner plates out of a set of china I have had for a very long time (though it has already been subject to the erosions of accident).

While The Good News is the podcast I did the recording for some weeks ago is now available, I do think it would have been civil on their part to let me know this, rather than for me to discover this while looking up the site to give the details to someone with a book to promote which might fall within their remit.

BUT I did manage to find a book which I realised might be research relevant in the tottering piles. Even if I cannot think what has happened to that not very impressive (well, didn't much impress me) critical work on Delafield, which perhaps I ought at least to look at.

First we had that thing whereby people were buying books on Kindle and reading them and then returning them and getting refunds? (I mean, I would have thought Kindle would have been able to tell if something had been read, rather than downloaded in error or DNF very early on? apparently not. People have been ripping through entire series doing this, to the detriment of authors.)

Then we got this: Bookstagram Is Fueling an Unnerving Trend - well-brought up wolves are cringing in horror - readers are tagging authors in negative reviews of their works on social media:

many reviewers don’t feel like they’re being harsh when they tag a three-star review that ends up ruining an author’s day. “Some newer viewers think that’s just how social media is,” Topiwala says of tagging. Croucher theorizes that “people sometimes forget that authors are people and treat them like big brands or corporations instead.”

But this: okay, we know that Tulip Fever was a myth, so I am whistling over here and murmuring, South Sea Bubble, anybody? except that we do not think that it is going to be anything like that and have people investing the National Debt in it, srsly: The Crypto Revolution Wants to Reimagine Books

Didn't we have somebody Disrupting Publishing recently?

Anyway, this idea of people investing and being as it were Really Really Invested in what the writer was writing, seems to me like further ratcheting up a C18th notion of The Patron, who expected, as I wrote here, in return for support: 'fulsome dedications of the works, the occasional obsequious letter praising their generosity, and the odd grovelling sonnet'. So that this is more like the Patron demanding that the Writer indite a 3-volume novel in which there is a Hero greatly resembling himself, vicious satirical portraits of his enemies, etc etc, or at least demanding input into the progress of the tale.

Again, this seems Point Thahr Misst even before you get to the technicalities of their misapprehensions over copyright and so on.

I’m Bridget Christie, a comedian, but I don’t just see comedy. Last weekend I went to a spellbinding exhibition of British folk art called Ritual Britain, set perfectly in London’s atmospheric Crypt Gallery in the bowels of St Pancras New Church in London.

And one might feel a leeeetle boggled at all this rather pagan remnant stuff in the crypt of a church:

Morris dancers, druids, the Burryman – they’re all in Ben Edge’s spellbinding collaboration with the Museum of British Folklore, showcasing customs that stretch back into the mists of time.

I did rather like this, which seems to be going some way towards recognising the mutability of festivals and rituals:

For Edge, it doesn’t matter that so many of the original meanings have been lost. It’s precisely this lack of clear, historical facts that makes these bizarre customs so appealing to him as an artist. The uncertainty creates a space for us to insert ourselves into them. It allows us to embellish and add to them – and it’s in the retelling of these stories that we keep them alive. They’re not relics from another time. They tell us who we used to be, but they also tell us who we are now, and who we want to be. They change and evolve just as we do – and they’re changing all the time. In response to the Black Lives Matter movement, many Morris dancing groups, such as the Hook Eagle Morris men, changed their black face paint to blue. Other groups refused to, claiming they’d be disrupting an ancestral tradition.

And reading this, I'm afraid I just thought: 'that was very rude'

Edge’s obsession with folklore began by accident one day five years ago when he was on his way to meet the Ravenmaster at the Tower of London, but spotted a line of druids walking along the road and followed them instead.

Because the source for Norbert-Elias-The Civilising-Process-for-Dummies notion I have is not even Journal of Saw It Somewhere Studies, it is Proceedings of I Think I Heard This In A Conference Presentation Once.

Anyway, I was given to think about it by reading various of those infuriating accounts of people not observing requirements to wear masks in various settings, and thinking, I am sure there are other things they quite unthinkingly do because there is by now a completely unspoken social contract that these are things that people do in these particular situations, but masks for these people are an intrusion and a thing they have to think about (I advert here to Katharine Whitehorn's piece on people who 'always think' this or that because they have got thinking out of the way on whatever thing it was and no longer have to bother their heads).

Which reminded me of the impression I had of Elias's account of The Civilising Process: which is, that when somebody first suggests or does something, be it a behaviour or a reform, it is weird and people probably cry out at it or mock it -

E.g. who are these effete types who blow their noses on handkerchiefs - let us satirise them in plays and comic prints etc. And as for these cranks who condemn cruelty to animals, virtue-signalling prigs who do not want people to enjoy themselves at ye tradde bear-baitinge.

You then get a phase during which behaviour is learned and taught and has to be thought about and policed - 'nice people use their handkerchief, darling' - and people go some way with reforms (Metropolitan cattle troughs keep working animals in better condition, as it might be, and bear-baiting brings riotous crowds of urban rabble, let's not be having that) but not to the wild extremes ('ban fox-hunting???!!!')

And then these things get assimilated to the point where it's not about thinking, but about The Conduct Proper to Living in a Society with Other People -

Obviously a lot of this is very culturally mediated. I was a bit startled recently at the designation of us Brits as a loose and lawless culture and can only suppose that the people who were writing this had never tried jumping a queue in the UK...

But this was a process that did used to take time, even several generations (we still see this, in the excusing of older family members' bad takes as being because They Were Of Another Day - yeah, the 60s, mutter mutter).

On the other hand, there are times when things have changed/do change with sudden rapidity.

Especially if there are several papers to a panel, moderator should be rigorous about keeping them to time. (And people giving papers should time them in advance.)

(Okay, I will give passes for unexpected AV issues.)

This is doubtless the fault of the hosting institution, a renowned civic Institution of Teh Highah Learninz, but Y No Microphones? The acoustics, really, were not all that.

People - paper-givers and attendees - are there for the discussion. Leaving inadequate or no time for questions is Not A Good Look (I was flabbergasted by the person I knew who ran a day symposium which involved inviting people to a university city in the Netherlands that took considerable travelling to at a wintery time of year and had not factored in time for questions after speakers. WOT. I CANNOT EVEN.) (This was the person who had decided that @oursin was such a wit that they greeted my every utterance, even 'it's very wet out', as if I were the lovechild of Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward.)

I would also factor in longer coffee breaks and a space to have them in that was not broken up awkwardly by tables...

I.e. there were some good papers but I did not have the chance to get into the discussion I would have liked and it was (me and my S Dakota posse agreed) not as good as the one we were lately at for vibrant intellectual exchanges.

Also, entirely personal irk, I went somewhat diva strop on a woman who waxed, I thought, somewhat patronising to me on areas which are, do admit, not so much My Mastermind Special Subjects, but The Subjects Mastermind Comes to Dr Oursin to set. ('I am something of an expert on X'.)

However, at least I had a better night's sleep last night, made a very expeditious getaway and got an even earlier train than I had hoped for (on which my off-peak ticket was valid).

Okay, there are certainly worse monsters cropping up all the time on Ask a Manager, and this is somebody who has some degree of self-awareness and some consciousness that They Are The Problem but even so I was twitching madly on reading this: I am what you’d call a “crammer” — I’m always trying to fit “one more thing” in before heading to the next event and, as a result, I am late in the mornings, late to meetings, etc.

I suppose that's slightly better than someone who is just constantly being distracted on the way to something else? It is still something that I would find madly irksome. (And reading the comments and those accounts of people who say 'let's go' and then, when everybody else is ready, are still pootling about for a considerable time.... shudder.)

Although we do think that this person is trying to fill the unforgiving minute with more than its due 60 seconds-worth in a way that is surely not sustainable over the long term: 'The Big Boss gives me a lot of flexibility around this because I regularly work 70+ hours per week'.

I also wonder if they need some kind of constant flow of micro-adrenaline hits: I bet the writer of the problem is also a person who falls into this category: There Are Two Types of Airport People: Some travelers love being late, not just because they're trying to squeeze things in before they make their journey to the airport, but because they get some kind of thrill from the drama and the excitement and the fear of missing their flight.

Yesterday somebody (a journo-type person, name vaguely familiar) contacted me via DM on Twitter, could they speak to me?

About what, I respond.

Apparently a certain niche sex practice is becoming practically mainstream, is writing piece about this, would like some historical background. Did not ask for phone no and convenient time to speak.

As it happens, I did a little research on particular niche practice as well as knowing something about the more general area in historical context and provided this, via DMs, including the Wayback link I managed to dig up to an online article of mine that had vanished from its quondam location.

Usual provisos supplied about how it's very hard to know much about niche sexual subcultures, outside of porn and sex work and weird fetishy and possibly entirely fantasy correspondence columns in certain otherwise straight-looking periodicals (I refer my readers to the Victorian Nipple Ring saga, see relevant tag) before the later C20th

No feedback as to whether this was what was actually required, and NO THANKS.

Query: was I supposed to supply a phone no so we could chat, or what?

ETA Well, they have now, finally, DM'd back with gratitude and hoping that they may quote me in article...