Recently, I’ve come to more and more and more and more get in touch with my inner old lady. My old lady hates the young whippersnappers and their bad manners and lack of civility. She hates how courtesy is dead and people hide behind email to front their rudeness. She is downright and damn cranky.

Here’s the first hint of my self revelation on this score. It starts with a wander down memory lane. Way back when in the dark ages when the internet was still capitalized as Internet, and Ronald Reagan and just about everyone else but the geeks had never heard the initials TCP/IP, I worked in a warehouse instead of embarking upon my not completely illustrious collegiate career. All sorts of folks worked with their hands back in those days. It was the only job I could get, and from morning to afternoon I packed school and office supplies into boxes for shipping.

In so many places you might work, in all sorts of fields, but maybe especially in the soul-crushing, bone-breaking gigs for low pay, long hours and without white collars, invariably there is a crusty, crotchety, seasoned player who becomes both a nagging voice of begrudging mentorship and an invaluable ally. For my warehouse gig, there were multiple such souls; it was the entire crew of the “mother’s shift,” working the same hours as their kids were in school from cradle to quite possibly grave.

The ladies oriented me to all sorts of deep insider knowledge. The key pieces of information were to place the lid back on your glue can when you left for the night to avoid cockroaches floating in mucilage come the morning and NEVER, EVER, NEVER go to the paper aisle alone if Phil was working.

The positions at the warehouse broke down on gender lines. Men in the warehouse drove forklifts and shipped the heavy stuff, women picked items off the shelves to fulfill orders and packed the boxes of smaller items. We women folk also managed the paperwork, so it was up to us to make sure the heavy stuff for any order was in stock and set aside for delivery. This last little bit necessitated walking down the long, lonely rows of warehouse lanes, walled in by ceiling high stacks of every sort of paper or paper product imaginable, folders, bond of every shade and weight and the trusty elementary school staple of manila drawing paper in every size, to check off inventory with a stub of a pencil.

Like a spider in a paper box web, Phil rode his forklift back and forth stacking and reordering and order fulfilling, waiting for his moment. To go into his lair alone was at minimum a litany of sexist catcalls, at worst a too close forklift blocking your path for the possibility of an uninvited grope. Phil also kept porno mags in a desk drawer for break time. Nice.

I never fell into his trap. I heeded the chorus of older women and their sage warnings. I never walked alone.

It was a hard but good and invaluable lesson to learn early in my life that those women who were there before me knew shit I didn’t. In every single fucking job in the known universe, the people who were there before you got there know stuff. They just fucking do. When I learned the job, I too could share my experience with a newer comer than me.

Come to realize I am now the crusty vet. Here’s the twist, and I believe it true even if it does smell of the completely trite canard of “When I was your age…,” the difference is now the damn fucking kids don’t listen. It’s exhausting and annoying.

I blame the computers.

Awhile back and probably more than I can remember, I have commented (or whined) about the current kids bringing my workaday world down. This week, though, I thought of those old ladies showing me how to pack boxes and stay safe in the warehouse and had an epiphany. While I aspire to them, I can’t be them, because common courtesy, etiquette if you will, has gone the way of the buffalo (and likely those ladies given their serious addictions to Marlboros and other sticks of tobacco).

Increasingly, I have been getting into conversations where I end slack-jawed, unbelieving that manners don’t exist where I work. I exaggerate, they do, but not for a whole lot of folks with whom I must toil shoulder to shoulder. Daily, there are few pleases and thank yous and many more unbidden demands and full-on interruptions.

It breaks on age and class lines. People with long resumes or a varied work history tend to open interactions with (1) some kind of greeting; (2) eye contact; (3) some kind of acknowledgement if you’re in the middle of something and end with (4) a polite remark of closing with warm regard or thanks, you know like “yo homes smell you later,” or even a head nod. It ain’t much, but it’s a conversation.

Far more of the people without work experience or life experience figure cc’ing you on an email is acknowledgement enough. The double whammy of ignorant, rude stumbling is the one-two punch of shooting off an email with a cc followed by a casual encounter. Here’s the order I fucking hate. HATE.

Dickhead shoots off an email telling someone else what I will do for him. Then, that dickhead swings by desk to update me on what’s going on and for what I have now been involuntarily volunteered without any concern for my time or needs. WRONG FUCKING ORDER.

Same exact amount of time, much happier outcome, talk to me first. Simple.

Yeah, email has that fun 24-hour immediacy, but what the fuck maybe you could try conversing every now and again. It breaks down this way, if you tell me what’s up, and we agree on the next step all is cool. If you feel like you have to “debrief” once the horse is out of the barn and my phone is already ringing and my email boxes is getting replies to what you set in motion, you fucked up and you fucked me up. So now, fuck you.

And, you know what, when I called you on it, and you explained why cleaning out your email at night is efficient and you don’t have time for running things by me? That, honey, is just sheer blood-boiling, unadulterated bullshit. Make fucking time to talk to other people like a human, it will save you time. We wasted time by having to talk about what a colossal douchebag you can be.

What amazes me is last week and into this one, I’ve been having conversation after conversation where I’m trying to explain to someone why their behavior is rude, why the agency we use has stopped returning someone else’s dictatorial emails, or why professional, business emails should start with greetings end with sign offs and make no assumptions in the middle. It’s like that whole chapter in elementary school where you learned how to hold a fork and say “please” or “thank you” is now dropped from the curriculum.

In one such conversation, a truly Machiavellian co-worker listened to my advice and charted a plan of action. Only in that conversation what entered that person’s ears and then came back out restated from another orifice was, “Yes, to get people to do what you want sometimes you have to add civility and whatever, because then they will do more.” Here’s another thought, just be nice and respect other people and their time just, you know, ‘cuz it’s better than being an unmitigated asshole.

What really stunned me, though, is I whined to people my age or older than me, and in seconds, nay nano-seconds, they understood me. One simply said the dickhead scenario above is “not cool, who doesn’t know that.” Another just coaxed me off the ledge by reminding me that our lives with some cordiality were actually more pleasant.

I dream, though, of just being an old, whisky and cigarette-voiced broad, like the ones who taught me the ropes of school-supply packing. A drag of a Virginia Slim, a withering look, and a well placed, “I guess you could do it that way. But that would be stupid. Your call.”

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