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Missed Manners
Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.
Sam Burns: You’re a very rude young woman. I know Douglas from the Rotary and I can’t believe he’d want you treating customers so badly.
Checkout Girl: I don’t think I was treating her badly.
Sam Burns: Then you must be from New York.
- John Lithgow and Judy Dickerson at a grocery checkout line from Terms of Endearment (1983)
That may have been New York of almost 25 years ago, but in a recent survey by Reader’s Digest of 35 cities across the world, New York now ranks as No. 1 as “the most courteous” in terms of politeness.
If New Yorkers were actually impolite, they would be saying “In your face!” to the rest of the world. Mumbai, India, which took the No. 35 spot, was less than pleased with the results. Even a comedian from Great Britain commented that London’s sad No. 18 designation was probably due to its over-politeness of letting the previous 17 cities jump ahead in line.
Now 35 is hardly a good representative sample of all the cities across the globe, but it does give one pause to think about what our own personal criteria should be when we think about how we and others around us act in our daily lives. Do you say and/or receive a “thank you” when performing a transaction with a salesclerk? Would you help someone pick up their papers on the street if they…
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