UPFRONT:WHEN THE BEYONCÉ comes home, I'm on the phone. It's a stressful 10 minutes of push and pull between me and the telemarketer. She is anxious to tell me of all the ways I could improve my current situation by switching to what she's selling. I am anxious to get off the phone, but she seems like a nice woman, she's only doing her job and even though she is the third to have called today and I do have a bit of a workload piled up and some phone calls of my own to make, I don't want to be rude.
And that, you see, is what takes priority – the anxiety to avoid all offence. Lately, so anxious am I not to be rude that I have taken instead to lying to telemarketers outright, a much less morally compromised response, don’t you think? Now when they call and ask for the owner of the phone line, I lie through my smiling clenched teeth. “No, Fiona McCann is not here at the moment,” I tell them, sweating bullets as I do because, though bare-faced lying is obviously better than being ill-mannered, I am aware that it’s a thin line. “Why, yes! Calling back later sounds like a great idea!”
This is not, as the Beyoncé points out, the most effective policy. It’s putting off the inevitable moment of refusing whatever they’re peddling. You know, the actually saying “no” bit, the thought of which outright confrontation makes me hide under the bedclothes. I’d almost rather buy their stupid phone plans than have to give them a slap in the face like that. Sheesh.
Of course, he is American and therefore allowed to be rude, or as he terms it himself, direct. When telemarketers call him, they rue the day they were born. First thing he does is asks them for their home phone numbers. You know, so he can ring them at home some time. That shuts them up fairly lively. It’s a wonder to watch.
But that’s Americans for you. When I worked in Cape Cod one summer, I was astounded at the levels of rudeness that went unremarked on and even, and this is where the mind boggled, unresented. Diners would happily send back dishes they hadn’t ordered or didn’t like without so much as an abject apology. Just like that! As if they had rights, and should be served exactly what they’d ordered, rather than accept whatever the kitchen gave them and be grateful for small mercies.
But see, that’s what you get for not being Irish. A licence to be, if not rude, then at least upfront. Can you imagine the chaos that would reign if we all just said what we thought? Sure why would you do that when you can go round the houses about it?
Of course this only works in an Irish context. During a stint in Buenos Aires I had my upfront Argentinian friends rolling their eyes at every ambiguous answer and long-winded reply to a
simple question. Add to this my own mute shock at one particular friend who would waltz into my
house and help herself to the contents of my fridge without so much as a by-your-leave. Such rudeness!
I was so offended I didn’t say a word about it.
Finally, she clocked my tight-lipped smiles and references to a wasting disease perhaps caused by my magically emptying fridge. Well, did that one ever backfire. Next thing you know she was calling me rude for pussy-footing around like that, silently seething at her presumption while failing to register that such a comfort in my presence was a mark of friendship.
Apparently, she found my constant may-I-please-take-a-sup-of-milk-for-the-tea-if-it-wouldn’t-greatly-inconvenience-you politeness rude in the extreme, a kind of masquerade of manners that we should have been way beyond.
But, I carefully explained, I didn’t want to be rude! But see, that’s the problem with an Irish system that may have stemmed from straightened times when you’d never presume to ask a friend for something you weren’t sure they could spare. And let’s face it, in times past there was nothing to spare. Besides, you didn’t have to ask anyway, because they’d generally push it on you regardless, in true Mrs Doyle fashion.
Thus we say “no thank you”, when we mean “bring it on”; “won’t you please come in?”, when we mean “would you ever feck off?”; and “not a bother”, when we mean “you must be joking”. And at the root of it is the fear, the soul-clenching terror of causing offence. I have let relationships run way beyond their natural course, have attended parties that aged me in minutes, and spent far too long at my own doorstep engaging with Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Legion of Mary and glad-handing politicians for just that reason.
The consequence is that though I’m determined not to be rude myself, I’m increasingly aggrieved at those who don’t seem to mind being so themselves. It’s like a contest of niceties which I’m winning hands down because I am not standing on someone’s doorstep wasting their precious time. Except lately, nobody else is playing by the rules.
That’s the problem with this whole manners business – it’s a two-way thing. And Irish public communication involves messages so subtle they are less easy to crack than the Navajo code. The idea is not to offend others, while trusting in the theory that they are similarly hard at work avoiding offending you. That way we all spend our days falling over ourselves trying to interpret our interlocutor’s true meaning, never directly articulated, mind you, safe in the knowledge that they are equally perplexed by our own. Thus the delicate ecosystem of Irish manners is maintained. Then along comes a Yank like the Beyoncé, and the whole thing goes belly-up, with his straightforward articulation of his own needs, and his expectation that I do the same. Are you out of your land-of-the-free mind? I would ask, but far be it from me to be so rude.
I am, however, learning. The other day, for example, I neither lied to nor indulged a telemarketer! I was the epitome of assertion – upfront and direct in my response, a mark of serious progress wouldn’t you say? “Yes, this is Fiona McCann,” I told the telemarketer, bold with the truth and fired with resolve. “I’ll just put you on to my fiance.”
fionamccann@irishtimes.com