In the Realm of Manners

In a manner of speaking, humdrum human activities often taken for granted entail socially acceptable good behavior called proper, pleasing or good manners.

Manners may vary from every country and culture.  Take burping.  The adult kind, I mean.  For the Chinese at feast, burping is a sign of appreciation and satisfaction.  For Europeans, it’s simply gross.

Another is sniffing to hold back one’s nasal emissions.  We believe this is better than blowing one’s nose publicly, but it’s coarse and shows lack of proper training to a young German friend who finds it more proper to blow one’s nose rather than sniff during a meal.

There, it is polite to bring some food or drinks to a home party, potluck or not.  As a knee-jerk reaction over something that I learned the embarrassing way, I tried to do the same here by asking what I may bring when I was invited.  I was told off as having affectations.  Uh-huh.

But there are norms that are universally acceptable.  In a car, protocol dictates that the passenger seat nearest the curb is for the most senior, whether in age or rank, and women, which no feminist would mind. The host of a party talks least; the true-blue host is the subtle conversationalist who keeps all his guests talking comfortably.

Waiting for one’s turn in a queue is another universal norm.  There’s no such thing as getting ahead of a line because one came later, anywhere, be it in some upscale department store in Makati or a public artesian well in Timbuktu.

The propriety of where and when mobile phones are used may be another universal standard.  While it is said that mobile phone manners is still a developing concept, common sense tells us that these should not be used inside a church, especially when services are going on.  Imagine the effect of a ringing mobile phone during a funeral service.  Those whose phones ring during speeches and programs or even during movie shows inside theaters may belong to the thoughtless breed.  So are owners of phones that ring too loud and too often in a boat or a bus.

Once, in a boat from Tagbilaran to Cebu, I had the misfortune of sitting beside two young women who talked loudly, with punctuations supplied by the continuous ringing of their mobile phones at maximum volume.  They gave the impression that they were the only living specimens in the universe, daft enough not to notice that they were annoying.

Lately, I was part of a queue of boat passengers for Cebu hoping to be waitlisted.  I was next in line when a young man who just arrived at the terminal went straight to the booth without regard for the queue.  When I called his attention, he answered that he’s actually not overtaking.  He wrote his name on a piece of paper and placed it on top of the submitted slips anyway.  I requested the ticketing clerk, who knew her job, to set aside his slip of paper.  Too bad for that idiot; he would have been good-looking if he were not a boor.

That boor is no match though to a steward of a domestic ferryboat.  The husband and I were at the Cebu terminal over two hours ahead of schedule.  We were the seventh early birds who checked in and had the privilege of choosing our seat numbers.

We were already comfortably seated when I noticed three passengers looking at us with confident smiles.  I surmised those two males and one female, healthy young people approaching the overweight side of the scale, could be in their late twenties.  They may have been special to the steward, relatives or townmates perhaps, because he went out of his way to give them the seat that they wanted, which was the husband’s.

The steward brusquely asked us for our tickets.  He went down to the terminal, came back, and asked the husband to transfer to another seat at another level of the boat.  He had the husband’s seat number changed!

Perhaps it was the long boring wait at the terminal, or that we had to wake up at dawn for a 9 a.m. boat trip, or simply the unfairness of it all; the husband was unusually testy.  In ordinary times, his voice is stentorian enough.  Enraged, he sounds like he has swallowed a microphone.  He thundered at the steward it made the other passengers look our way.  I cringed in my seat and made myself very small, wishing that the battle were mine because, at least when I’m angry, my voice squeaks.

The ship captain came.  Train your men to have manners, again the husband thundered.  Thankfully the captain of Ocean Jet had a cool head.  The female of the seat-coveting trio dealt her last card by saying that one of them would end up sitting away from the other two.  What a flimsy reason for the trouble we were going through. Staggering in their self-importance, they had no qualms running roughshod over us, their senior in age but their equal as paying passengers.  We came way ahead of you and chose these seats whose numbers are on our tickets, I told her.

Learning how things are properly done takes many forms.  More than what personal upbringing or the classroom can offer, it could be through one’s observations, tips from others, or from one’s own mistakes.  A sense of fairness can go a long way too.  Good manners, after all, are but thoughtfulness and consideration for other people, including strangers.  The steward and his three friends may have learned it their own way.

(2005)