![]() What her writing offers is not the workaday satisfaction of a reference book ( So that ’s where Belgium is ) - it is, rather, a distilled version of the pleasure on offer in Kafka or Dickens or Woolf. At the end of an enervating, back-to-back-birthday-party weekend, I refresh myself with a dash of Martin’s counter-stereotypically warm and tolerant writing about children (“If it is wrong to make cracks about the elderly, and an aging population is working hard on that, then it should be wrong make cracks about the young.”) Fighting off yet another cold ( It’s not Covid, I swear! ), I wrap myself in the wry sympathy of her chapter on illness (“It is of surprisingly little comfort to be told that one’s sickness is considered by others to be either more serious or more trivial than one has oneself decided that it is.”) In the almost twenty years I’ve owned it, Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior - an 800-plus page brick of good sense - has rarely rested on the shelf. Many a novelist, toiling away at his own unruly orchard of human predicaments, would do well to peer over the fence. Her prose is clear and funny and no more acidic than necessary. Her obsessions are neither trivial nor queasily intimate. Only Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners, seems to have mastered the fragile chemistry. But the advice column’s landscaping tends to be a mess: the soil is either inhospitably arid (quotes from ancient stoics, weedy strands of college ethics) or disastrously soupy (fervid self-involvement, ransom-letter-esque capitalization). Visit Miss Manners at, where you can send her you questions.The advice column and the novel should be happy neighbors, surrounded by their common flora - anguish, confession, the occasional bloom of wisdom. Miss Manners recommends that rather than causing officewide resentment and an HR firestorm, you find a way to take care of your hygienic impulses in private. Surely, your co-workers have lots of disgusting habits that they would like to take care of quickly and in public, but no one wants to see or hear them, either. I find it handy to just take care of them then and there. I work in a cubicle and usually notice that my nails are getting longer while typing on a keyboard. Is it rude to clip your nails at your work desk? And further emphasize your point by sticking to daylight and business hours. Miss Manners hopes that you will consider this and break ties. Surely the damage your business - or safety - could suffer from being associated with a convicted criminal is greater than that of losing a client. #JUDITH MARTIN GENTLE READER PROFESSIONAL#Should I just act like I know nothing, while keeping this nasty, immoral human scum at arm’s length? Or should I break all professional ties with him? I really need the business, but I don’t need the “ick factor.” My husband has signed me up for a gun permit (sigh) since I am often at the nursery till midnight or 1 a.m. Now I’m quite sick and my head is spinning. Come to find out, this man and his son are both convicted sexual predators whose mutual victim was less than 16 years of age. So many red flags!Īfter a few days, I was still a bit unnerved with this odd behavior, and I did a public search. I did tell him “This feels rather unprofessional,” and he exited soon after - but not until he tried to get me on a boat with him (I refused nicely), told me how much money he makes, what a great guy he is, that his wife is not nice and is dying of breast cancer, that he breeds dogs part time and other irrelevancies. I let him know only professional information but also dropped my husband’s name quite often, which he mirrored by saying how great his son is over and over. I had been working with this man for about a month when he showed up one day “just to talk” and get to know me. A professional relationship has quickly turned icky, but turning away business isn’t a great option for me. I am a “one-woman band” with a small plant nursery business. How do I kindly tell him that I’ll talk about what I like? I never place any restrictions on his part of the conversation - even though his ages-long drama with his quirky in-laws bores me to tears. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |