The Rules Blog and Podcast

Stephanie from Kirribilli writes:

It’s only mid-December and I’ve already been invited to a group function on 16 February. How do I politely decline an invitation for an event that is so far in advance? It would be very hard to say you are busy and I’d feel rude saying I’m not very keen to go… what do you do?

Steven says:

Tell the person in question you wash your hair on the third Saturday of the month so won’t be able to make it. Or you can take the wimp’s way out — my favourite — and say you’d love to go. Nearer the time you succumb to that unfortunate bug that’s going around your house or have to take an emergency peacemaking trip to Yemen.

Now what are you doing on 5 March because you sound hot?

Miss Rhylla says:

“Did you say the 16th of February? Oh, I’d love to but it’s the third anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol and I’ve made a promise not to emit any greenhouse gases on that day. Leaving the house is out of the question sadly. That IS a shame.”

It’s fine that your friend/acquaintance is organising so far in advance - that’s their prerogative - but you don’t have to do so too. Unless it is something particularly special (or involves international flight bookings and a visa) I assume they don’t need an RSVP from you today. So it seems fair enough to say, thank you and that when you get around to buying your 2008 diary you’ll look at putting it in.Why do today what you can procrastinate about for another two months?

Christmas break: We’re taking a break for Christmas and look forward to answering all your questions in 2008. Please do email us.

Karen asks:

Am I required to buy my boss a holiday gift? I think the boss should be buying me a gift, but others in the office want to throw in to buy the boss a gift. I say no way. I have never worked anywhere before where this was expected. My former employer always gave out a bonus or paid for a party for their employees and never expected a gift from those who work for them. Am I living in fantasy land or do employees really do this?

Miss Rhylla says:

It can all get a little out of hand this gift-giving business can’t it? I think the fact that you are using the word ‘required’ about giving a gift to your boss is telling. Surely a gift should be something shared between consenting participants, a little something from one to another and not something forced.

Tricky when everyone else in the office is chipping in though and you feel like the Grinch. I wish you luck with that.

Can I just say, I think a pay bonus is a completely separate issue, that is more a coincidence of timing and is an end-of-year thing to be handled at your boss’s discretion based upon your contribution all year so is not comparable to a gift.

I am curious however that you seem to think your boss “should buy you a gift.” Really? For giving you a job and paying you all year isn’t sufficient? If you are so resistant to sharing something to celebrate the season with them I am a little bemused you carry expectations of getting something.

Call me hokey, old-fashioned, but if more of us thought about who we’d really like to share a gift with and took the time to give something (however small) in a real spirit of generosity rather than getting caught up in the transactions of “they got me something, I guess I have to get them something” the whole festive season might be more fun.

Anyway Karen, here’s to the season - egg nog and mistletoe snogging all round I say. I hope it is merry and that your pear trees are chock full of partridges, whatever your relationship to your boss may be.

Steven says:

I’m not a big giver of Christmas gifts, as my family will tell you, so I’m certainly not a big fan of being compelled to give. We just had the office Kris Kringle/Secret Santa. Loathsome. I think you are neither required to buy the boss a gift nor is s/he required to buy you one.

I would try to say something funny at this point but bah humbug is upon me.

It’s a bumper end of year episode, starting with the question of what to do when a colleague suggests renting your spare room for him to use as a shag pad with his mistresses.

Miss Rhylla and Steven will be off till the new year but keep your questions coming in, please, and do of course join our Facebook group.

And you can subscribe to the podcast feed in iTunes using the link on the right or get new blog posts and podcasts emailed to you by putting your address in the box at the top right.

The Rules is nothing without its listeners so thank you to everyone who has listened, especially those of you who keep us going with your great questions and kind feedback.

If you like us, don’t forget to check out our friends at The Manners Cast.

 

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Karen from Bankstown writes:

My colleagues run from their office to the photocopier & back for NO REASON. I think it is ridiculous and they should all be fired for trying to look so busy and important. It is something that has annoyed me for years as there is nothing more distracting that hearing “Judy from accounts” breaking into a run and thumping around the floor on her way to get a paperclip from the stationery cupboard.
Steven says:

Ah yes, the strings race to crescendo while the camera switches to slow motion as Judy makes that hero-dash to get the scissors. She’s got only seconds to cut the red wire before the dirty bomb sent by the Algerian office takes out Accounts and all hope of reconciliation by the end of the tax year.

Judy Bauer is up there with the sort of office hero who soldiers into work bleeding from the eyes with Ebola. The world, people, the w-h-o-l-e world, will fall to ruin if Judy is away from her desk for the day. More than once some Judy has run through her medical chart with me to prove her devotion to duty only to have to add “devastating emotional shock” to the list. That’s because Judy nearly has a stroke when I tell her to bloody well go home and leave the rest of us in health.

Karen, most people are so stupid the only honorable course for them would be to donate their dense craniums as armour-plating for Humvees. Not after they’re dead. Now. Donate now.

Judy’s probably not going to volunteer for that and forcing her is still illegal (which it wouldn’t be if stupid people were stripped of the vote as I advocate). I suggest running some fishing wire across the corridor between Judy and the stationery cupboard. Her running will be seriously hampered by two broken ankles.

Miss Rhylla says:

Ah, poor Judy from accounts. We do give her a hard time on The Rules, but she probably deserves it. My new year’s resolution is to come up with a new fictional person to tag with these often shameful stories. Vishna from IT, Rupert in HR, or Tullulah from Knowledge Management…? I digress.

The busy-ness epidemic is indeed madness and something that I am all in favour of stamping out, wherever it lives. I’ve been lured in by its siren song on occasion and have been known to break into a photocopier-bound trot before. Busy & Important can manifest itself in all sorts of guises; scampering to the printer, breathlessly snatching up the phone, sighing and puffing as you head up and down the corridor brokering peace in the Middle East and squeezing in a spot of open heart surgery before lunch, all while getting your timesheets done.

Some bosses may encourage it thinking if everyone is “busy” that’s a good thing, but of course the problem with this sort of caper is that it is has a bird-flu like infectiousness and a similarly detrimental impact on productivity. My advice is to enlist supporters for your anti-scampering cause, and all sing out with questions for the runners each time they jog past, “is someone on fire?”, “has Ebola broken out in the lunchroom”, “is there a bomb in the ladies loo?”, “how many laps to go now?” or set up a drinks station – marathon style – with cups of water and power bars and cheer them on as they hurtle past. My guess is it will eventually slow them down – or at least send them on a different route.

Jonathan writes:

We have employee-only showers installed in our company toilets for people to use after using nearby running trails. A few days ago, I went to use the shower and found a large poo on the shower floor. Obviously, I did not use the shower.

Since no one has owned up to the offending poo, should I address it? It was disgusting, but I want to know which of our filthy miscreants would do such a thing! Surely the person had to have known that they had left a souvenir on the shower floor! I believe this person should be flogged!

Steven says:

This is a curly one. Ha, ha, ha. I sleigh me (yuletide pun to add to hilarious opening joke). This is obviously a psychological problem on the part of the one laying the turd. There are no two ways about it. You don’t — can’t — accidentally lay a turd. They don’t just slip out unnoticed.

“Excuse me, sir, you’re probably not even aware of this but you’ve just shat all over the floor.”

“Confound it! Not again! I’ll have to tie my trouser legs tighter.”

I can’t see any way to address it, myself. If the culprit wants to be caught, s/he’ll leave a clue. Maybe s/he’ll take a leaf out of Neil Armstrong’s catheter bag and claim their work with a business card fluttering on a toothpick.

You could log (another pun for the season) the use of the shower, checking the floor in between callers. Fleur tells me they used to have to do this at her Sydney private school when some young lady started doing the same as your colleague. That’s posh girls’ schools for you.

Miss Rhylla says:

Call in CSI and get some DNA tests done. Then call a witchhunt. This is a sociopath you are dealing with. I don’t think changing your place of work should be out of the question. There are clearly some elements there that are unsavoury, nay, frightening.

I’ve only just gotten over Psycho and may never be able to shower again.*

Also, those deeply repressed memories from my university days when I did some cleaning at a local pub are coming back to me. A bloodstained sheet with a loveheart drawn in lipstick, a tinned beetroot fight in a hotel room and dirty underwear in a shower stall… just some of the horrors that awaited me, my thick rubber gloves and a big bottle of bleach.

Who ARE these people?

*Steven adds:

If Rhylla stops showering, we may not be recording for a while.

Jonathan writes:

Why is it that people assume that it is okay to hold another person’s baby? I know they’re cute and all, but excuse me, that is my baby!

One month ago yesterday, my wife and I had our second child. Since then, some visitors (friends, relative, and the like) found an uncontrollable urge to pick up our baby, without asking us, mind you.

Yesterday, my sister-in-law stopped over. She wanted to hold the baby, so my wife asked her to please wash her hands, particularly since there is a rather virulent strain of influenza in our town. My sister-in-law refused to wash her hands, and then proceeded to pick up the baby!

From your podcasts, I understand you are also a father. Could you and Rhylla please help me with this situation?

Miss Rhylla writes:

I confess I do not have a baby of my own but if I had gone to the trouble of bearing a child I imagine I would be somewhat peturbed if someone decided to put their germy, rough hands all over him/her with not so much as a nod in my direction.

In the words of Hilary, it may take a village to raise a child but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask the villagers to back off, or at least wash their hands and wait their turn.

As new parents I reckon you should go with laying down the law. Your wife can always claim it was the hormones talking if things get out of hand - but hey. Your baby. Your rules. When you are operating on limited sleep I say you get to make the call.

Can I have a hold now? Let me just put down my vodka tonic and wipe this axle-grease off my hands first…

Steven writes:

Jack, my son, was born in post-colonial Hong Kong and, even in 1998, a white baby was enough of a rarity that people would stop me on the street and ask to be photographed holding him. Some parents I knew refused: they worried that inuring their babies to strangers would stop the baby screaming if it were being abducted; I think better of my fellow man, despite what you might think from reading this blog or listening to the podcast.

As a consequence, Jack has been held in all manner of ways by all manner of people whose health and hygiene I couldn’t vouch for. That said, if I thought one of them was ill or was going to hurt him with shonky baby-handling technique, I’d have refused or swooped down and pulled Jack from their clutches.

No one gets to hold your baby without your permission and no one gets to do it at a time or in a way that isn’t cool with you. I decided as soon as Jack was born that his wellbeing was my paramount responsibility and anyone who put his healthy or happiness in jeopardy could, quite frankly, go @$%! themselves if they didn’t like my intervening.

Jonathan writes: The other day I walked past a colleague’s desk and noticed he was surfing porn sites — at the office! Apart from our firm’s technology use policy, this is unacceptable behaviour. Shouldn’t he leave the porn-surfing at home?

Miss Rhylla says: I suggest getting the IT guys to rig up some software enabling the contents of your esteemed colleague’s computer to be tracked and perhaps screened at the next all staff meeting.And then have him walked from the building.

Steven says:  I desperately want to find some way to say what the guy was doing was okay, just because I’m contrary and I think there’s too much reaction to porn, but I can’t, I just can’t.

No one should be surfing porn at the office. More than anything, it reveals you to be too stupid to hold a job. I like Miss Rhylla’s idea, although — and you saw what he was surfing, so you might know — if he gets off on public humiliation, it might be just what he was after.

Lauren writes:

I am an American by birth, I am both well-travelled and have an intense affection for the English language. Thus, I speak with an exactness that tends to put some people off. I do not wish to alter my speech patterns to the current sloppy American vernacular. How do I best handle rude remarks, e.g.; “You’re American aren’t you? Why do you talk like you’re trying to sound like the Queen of England?” Any thoughts?

Steven says:

Lauren, Lauren, Lauren, how I hear your song. While I don’t sound like Her Britannic Majesty, I do get pulled up all the time for using “big words”. People, just because you don’t know what it means, doesn’t make it a “big” word.

Some of my friends are fans of functional linguistics, the philosophy that comprehension matters above all. “Give it me” may not be polite or grammatical but if I understand you would like me to give you something, mission accomplished. Speaking of which: George W. Bush would be a poster child for functional linguistics. I’m not a fan but I do understand language is evolving; and, conversely, phrases I think of as modern often turn out to be no such thing. HMQ might think of “hanging out” as a vulgar Americanism, for instance, but Keats was writing in the early 19th century of “hanging out” with his friends in London.

Obviously this is a favourite topic of mine but to get to the point…

I think our answer is in your question, Lauren: exactness puts most people off. I am often confused by someone speaking less than exactly or offended by someone who uses a word incorrectly, not realising the effect it will have on someone who knows what it means. I’ve had many unpleasant rows on the back of these misunderstandings; half the battle being to get the other person to at least understand that I’m not striking a pose: I was truly confused or genuinely offended. I always feel that I come out the loser because those who are not exact will never understand those of us who are. What they will understand is that we’re difficult and hard to be around sometimes.

But enough about me.

My experience tells me you and I, Lauren, are in in the minority. The dictionary — and often logic and reason — might be on our side, but if we want to be happy and move among the relaxed people, we’re just going to have to suck it up and loosen up. Supermarkets will always tell us to “use less plastic bags” (it’s FEWER goddamn it, FEWER plastic bags); Outlook will continue to want to make appointments for 12 p.m. (there is NO SUCH TIME: 12 is the meridian, fools, it can be neither ante nor post the meridian); and some of my friends will continue to use agreed meeting times as guidelines. But I’ll always be glad to see them when they get there.

Miss Rhylla says:

I am going to be dreadfully predictable and come down squarely on your side, Lauren. You are preaching to the choir with me.

You stick to your guns. A love of language and desire to communicate with clarity is a wondrous thing. As is accuracy with an apostrophe.

I venture your hecklers are threatened and confused, so I would caution against cornering them. Simply turn on your heel and take your beautifully crafted sentences with you, no point scattering pearls before swine.

Jake of Just Not Right asks:

If I send a text message to you, is it rude for you to immediately phone me back instead of responding with a text? I am of the opinion that communication should be kept intact unless otherwise noted. For example, I do not phone somebody in response to an email. If I get a text, I text back.

What do you think?

Steven says:

Texts are succinct by their nature. I’m not. For me to type a cogent, well-punctuated one-thumb reply takes an age so I’m going to choose a medium that suits my style. And I think that’s my choice. If you don’t want to wallow in one of my polysyllabic circumlocutions, don’t contact me. And let’s not forget that half of written communication is misunderstood so communication by phone can lead to fewer misunderstandings.

There’s no universal view of texts . Some people think texts are a good medium for everything from “running late” to “you’re fired” or the first “I love you“.* Others, like me, don’t — everyone knows you save that first “I love you” to shout above the noise of the bedstead hitting the wall.

Casual study suggests it’s an age thing. If you had a mobile at school, you’re more likely to find texts suitable for everything than those of us who had to pick up the phone or — gasp — walk round to someone’s door. No one’s right or wrong about that, but communication — like taking the piss out of someone — only works if it works for both of you.

Although I support channel-shifting, it doesn’t cut both ways. If I call you and leave a voicemail, for instance, I might find it dismissive if you jump channels and reply by text. Depending on what we were trying to talk about, I might infer from a phone-to-text swap that you didn’t want to speak to me. Why don’t you want to speak to me, Jake, why?

* NB After the first time, I’ll take “I love you” in any medium I can get it.

Miss Rhylla says:

Ahh Jake… you’ve asked the wrong girl this question. I am not a mad fan of the sms so am likely to pick up the phone at the slightest provocation. It’s often quicker in the end and skips over all those misunderstandings that are so easily created in text messages. Don’t even start me on the perils of intuitive text.

The exception for me is when I know someone is at work or in a meeting (or otherwise unavailable to chat) but needs an update type note - that is where sms comes into its own. I just don’t think it should ever try to replace ‘real’ communication. It’s a great supplementary form of keeping in touch but nothing beats a proper chat, or even better, a handwritten card.

Call me old-fashioned.

Lauren writes:

I realise that it is considered bad form to point out the rudeness and/or incompetence of others, however, rude behaviour and general incompetence is ubiquitous in America, specifically in L.A. In your view, when, if ever, is it appropriate to tell someone that their behaviour is adversely affecting me?

Steven says:

I try to live by the advice the Earl of Chesterfield gave his son:

Never seem wiser, nor more learned, than the people you are with. Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket: and do not merely pull it out and strike it; merely to show that you have one.

But I’m pretty much screaming that I’m an over-educated pompous sausage wallet by taking the words of an 18th century noblemen as my creed. (Using the word “creed” probably doesn’t help, either.)

Frankly, there’s too much sensitivity now to the lowest common denominator and we’re doing ourselves a disservice by not clipping that unruly child about the ear or pulling someone up for being inconsiderate. Why shouldn’t we try to raise each other to higher standards instead of accepting the lower standards of morons because we don’t want to say, “Excuse me, young man, I wonder if you would mind taking your phone sex off the bus. To be frank, I’m not that interested in knowing that Suzie wants it harder.”

If we don’t speak up, the unruly and inconsiderate win. And we can’t have the lower orders winning.

To paraphrase the earl, Lauren, I say go for it.

Miss Rhylla says:

As two people who rant routinely on such issues and broadcasters of a show “where we tell you how to live your life” I suspect our answers will not surprise anyone.

I confess the urges to chase people down the street to return their dropped rubbish, to tut-tutt at smokers and queue jumpers is growing by the day. The world is just such a better place to be in when there is a dash of civility and grace to grease the wheels.

The worry of course is that a simple “excuse me” can get you into a bag of trouble. Tightly wound commuters and already aggressive folks could turn on you at a moment’s notice. So you might need to be ready to scamper. Or learn karate. It’s a tough, rude world out there.