Etiquette: Advanced Edition

January 18th, 2005 Posted in 2005

This past Sunday I was walking through the laundry room in my building to get my bike. My mind was a hundred miles away, thinking about the errands I’d have to run. It wasn’t until I was navigating my bike out the door that I noticed an old lady folding clothes and staring at me. I politely nodded in her direction as I walked the bike past her.

I was halfway out the door when she started yelling.

I assumed she’d seen someone she knew out the door I’d just opened. “Man, is that guy in trouble,” I thought, as I looked around outside for the source of her rage.

Seeing no one, I looked back at her with a confused look on my face, as if to say: “There doesn’t seem to be anyone there,” then noticed she was staring right at me and frowning. Then it hit me: I was the guy in trouble.

Had I run over her foot with the bike? My face flushed in embarrassment as I tried to think of something I might have done to justify an elderly woman’s rage. Had she confused me with another tenant? Another tenant who beat up old ladies?

“I can’t even express how rude you are, young man,” she continued, fire billowing from her eyes. “You don’t know a single thing about etiquette. You are the rudest man I have ever met.”

I stood in the doorway, awkwardly propping up my bike. “I’m sorry?” I asked.

“When someone enters a room, they are supposed to say hello,” she explained. “It’s etiquette, which apparently you have no concept of.”

Ah. Suddenly I was back on solid ground again. The elderly woman was simply a lunatic.

“But you didn’t say hello either,” I said, trying to exonerate myself.

“It’s up to the person entering the room,” she clarified. Ohhhhh.

My grasp of etiquette is admittedly dodgy. I vaguely remember something about not holding doors open for ladies, eating before everyone’s sat down for dinner and holding people down to fart in their faces as etiquette faux-pas. But saying “hello” being incumbent on certain individuals based on their position in a room was evidently some higher form of advanced etiquette for the polite elite.

I was dubious. I mean, I guess it sounded sort of like it could be a rule. The whole thing seemed a bit random, though. Besides, even if she was right, I suspected that angrily yelling at strangers whose only crime was not doing anything probably trumped not saying “hi” in terms of etiquette don’ts.

I noticed that she’d waited until I was halfway out the door before screaming at me; I could tell she’d intended the remark as a parting shot just as the door closed. Because of this, I decided to initiate polite conversation about her arguments, pretending she hadn’t just screamed them at me.

“Etiquette you say? Fascinating. So the person who enters the room is obligated to make the hello?” I asked, leaning my bike against the wall and walking over to her.

This made her flustered, and she trailed off in embarrassment.

“Well, it’s just rude,” she said, and went back to her laundry, looking up occasionally to see if I’d left. I leaned against the dryer and peppered her with polite, interested questions about etiquette until she turned beet red.

“What if I’d only half-entered the room?” I mused. “Or if I’d been wearing a name tag?”

“I don’t really know,” she mumbled.

“Say I walked into the room backwards,” I postulated, pantomiming the action. “Would I be obligated to say goodbye? I’m just curious.”

Confident that she felt thoroughly awkward, I politely said “Hello!” as I walked my bike backwards out of the building. According to my roommate, who goes to all the tenants’ meetings, she’s apparently famous for being this sweet old lady who, for no discernable reason, suddenly and with no provocation turns on people like a rabid dog and screams at them. This made me feel a bit better. I’d hate to think it was just me, and I provoked this sort of reaction among crazy geriatrics in much the same way that some people always have dogs barking at them.

Either way, I like her style. What’s the benefit of growing old, anyway, if not to be able to pretty much say exactly whatever crazy shit enters your head in a consequence-free environment? She’s given me a blueprint for success in my twilight years.