Fucking YAY! The tile guys are here. Every step of the bathroom remodeling has seemed to lead to the mythical phrase “And then the tile guys will come and you’ll be all set.” Something like that anyway.
So, tile guys equal an end in sight.
Chatting with Jack, the older brother tile guy, while Billy, the younger brother tile guy, was sent to get coffee, made me realize a bit of why I got into a vicious time-sucking vortex yesterday with the Craig’s List guy. I generally like hearing people’s stories (to a point).
I enjoy chatting with folks getting different perspectives and all, and I’m a relaxed and casual seeming person. But, shit falls apart when casual becomes overly familiar and conversations go further than I want to go.
I think part of it is what a close friend and I were talking about last night — the end of formal civility. The etiquette where you don’t call people by their first names or nicknames on first meeting unless they tell you to and you hold your tongue rather than comment on the physical appearance of a distant acquaintance and you don’t ask invasive personal questions and you wait to be invited before entering or taking something or whatever, you just fucking wait, is effectively dead.
In fact, I think everything falls apart from the word “invited.” It’s like no one listens for the clues anymore that imply invitation and reception to go to the next level, preferring to just jump forward, cordiality be damned.
Like when the little boy down the street saw that I had a Happy Meal toy in my car and asked me if he could have it. That would have been a guaranteed smackdown in my kidhood.
Like when people throw out inappropriate, backhanded compliments for lost weight, a new outfit or whatever. “You look really good now, did you lose weight?”
Like when a total stranger walks through every room in your house and says “Don’t worry about it,” when you try to explain your discomfort.
Like when a Craig’s List caller asks “Why can’t you meet him at 6 a.m.?” Remember when a simple “No, that doesn’t work for me,” was all that was required and no one ever asked for an explanation.
The same thing goes for any conversation where you don’t want to eat cake or drink alcohol or have any kind of dietary restriction in your head — “Why don’t you want a drink?” “What are you on a diet or something?” “What? You’re Jewish, since when?” “Are you sure? Just one won’t kill you.” The deal used to be an unadulterated “No, thank you,” and you were free and clear from further comment.
Interestingly, and maybe surprisingly to my somewhat elitist mindset, the guys fixing my bathroom (i.e. guys who work for a living) seem to be way more polite in that way my mother would insist.
They apologize for not knocking when they don’t know that I am home. They offer to get me coffee if someone is going out for it. They use magic words like “please,” “excuse me,” “sorry,” “thank you” and ask before using my broom or getting water from the sink. Maybe it’s a customer service thang, but it doesn’t seem stilted or fake.
And, unlike the Craig Listers, who mostly have a more educated demographic (as if that’s a meaningful assessment of anything about a person), none of them have commented on the appearance of my place or my person or gotten into anything personal without my offering of information.
A couple of times I’ve talked about real estate value or the work going on outside of my house or the fact that I had to join a gym to shower, and none of the guys so far (the carpenters, plumbers, tile guys) has pried or made assumptions. There has been the formal give and take of conversations among cordial strangers even as they are right smack in the middle of my world for days at a stretch.
Maybe M. is right and part of the problem is the New England educated elitist feelings of superiority. The people who just assume their behavior is correct, because they are comfortable.