I belong to a women’s hiking group and we like to travel to fun destinations to hike. There are about 12-15 of us who go on these trips. Everyone gets along very well and we’ve never had any drama or issues. Until this year. We had two ladies drop for different reasons and had 2 spaces open. One of the ladies was offering her spot at half price. The group organizer, we’ll call her Ann, invited an acquaintance of ours we’ll call Betty. I know Betty from other women’s groups and see her about 3 times a week. Betty is ‘different’ and can be brash at times. Ann knows her through me and we all hike together in town with a different group.
For this trip another friend, Cathy, and I had our own room to share in the house at the destination with our own beds. Since Betty only knew Ann and me she asked me if I would switch rooms so she didn’t have to room with someone she didn’t know. I spoke with Cathy and she OKd switching rooms. The 3 of us ended up in the master with a king bed and a double futon. Cathy and I ended up sharing the king instead of having our own beds, which wasn’t a big deal.
The first morning Betty is up very early blow drying her hair with the bathroom door wide open waking Cathy & me up. We were going hiking all day that day so there really was no reason for hair and make up.
That night when we were trying to sleep Betty is talking loudly in our room on her phone. She also would answer her phone at the dinner table and proceed to carry on a loud conversation as we’re all trying to enjoy the meal and table conversation. She never excused herself, just sat there loudly yakking away. She really had no etiquette in that regard.
Betty brought up politics and religion out of the blue with one of the gals, Susie, who is a legal immigrant from another country. Susie told her several times she didn’t want to discuss it. Betty was telling Susie that Susie’s religion doesn’t believe in the true God and they don’t know the truth. That Susie’s religion breeds terrorism and there is only one true God. Betty was also touting the merits of the current US president and her own political party. They were in the back seat of a mini van with 5 other people in the van listening to this. Susie was very upset as Betty would not stop after being asked to do so several times. You could have heard a pin drop in the van. It was very awkward.
Betty also got very angry when we were rafting as she kept hitting one of the girls in the head as she wasn’t using her oar properly. She was very nicely asked to please watch her oar. Betty snapped she was doing it just fine and the other girl (who had rafted many times before and Betty never had) needed to watch her own oar.
At night she always went to bed way before us. One of the nights, when we got to the room to go to bed, we could hear her snoring through the closed door. It was that loud and she could be heard in the next room and down the hall as well. We tried to nudge her. We tried to shake her. We tried calling her name. We tried blasting loud music close to her head. She was on the futon so we picked up one side and dropped it. She didn’t budge. Cathy & I finally had to go to the living room and sleep on the couches. The girls in the other room didn’t get any sleep either due to her extremely loud snoring. We asked her about it in the morning and asked her to please switch rooms as one other gal offered. Betty again got very angry at us, said she doesn’t snore and was snapping at everyone all morning. These are people she just met.
She always made us wait for her to go on our hikes and excursions. One excursion we almost left her as we were all in the vans and she was told a few times we had to go as the tour left at a certain time. We ended up waiting 10 min for her as some of the ladies are too nice and wouldn’t leave her.
She didn’t want to play games with us. She didn’t want to hang out with us. I’m really not even sure why she came with us. She wasn’t super friendly to anyone.
Fast forward 3 weeks and I was driving a group of 5 ladies, including Betty, to a women’s event. Someone asked her how the trip was and she tells them first thing, she didn’t get any sleep and the beds were awful and the night she did get sleep she was forced to move! Wow! You get to go on a trip for half the cost of what the rest of us did. You make it miserable for most of us and now you’re complaining?! I couldn’t believe the nerve. 0918-17
Category: Just Plain Tacky
Etiquette Amnesia
I am usually not too demanding about how other people live their lives. I don’t even mind if people forget to thank me, or if they thank me with an e-mail or a quick note about something else, but I have noticed lately that there is an absence of etiquette among the young people of today. I have sent a gift of money, although not a large amount, to every one of my children who live away from home currently, and also to their offspring. I very seldom receive a thank you note. I have discussed this with many of my friends and they say they have the same problem with their kids. They, as well as I, have given a lot of etiquette training to our children when they were growing up, but the youngsters seem to have etiquette amnesia.
At first I used to send checks to the children, but then I noticed that they do not come back to my bank for a long time. When I asked them if they were going to cash the checks, I am told that they haven’t had time to go to the bank. So then I started sending cash. Recently, two family members have asked if we sent them a card since we usually do, but they never got one. I am glad they told me because I had no idea that there could possibly be a problem with the Post Office. Now, I don’t know what to do next. I asked a couple of the kids to come over and get their card. I delivered one card to their house. What a shame! Neither they nor we have much time to constantly making trips and staying home to receive cards. I finally e-mailed them all and told them my dilemma. Now they either feel guilty or disgusted with me for worrying about it. So the most recent thing I have done is e-mail them all and say “I’m sending you money on your birthdays, anniversaries, Halloween, and Valentine’s Day. Expect it. If you don’t get it, let me know. Thanks.” And if the robber of my mail needs it worse than I do, then I guess he/she can have it. 1111-08
I’m of the opinion that if you have to beg people to accept your gift, it’s time to stop giving those gifts. This isn’t just etiquette amnesia but also indicative of ingratitude that takes a rather blase approach to accepting a gift.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
This is one of those submitted stories where the story writer does not appear to understand that their actions are just as rude and entitled as the people being complained about.
My husband was scheduled for surgery that was going to take at least 5 to 6 hours, not too mention all the diagnostic tests that were scheduled to be run prior to surgery (add about another 3 to 4 hours). Knowing that I would be at the hospital all day, I came prepared with plenty of magazines, plus my portable DVD player and some movies. I read the magazines during the test period, then when they took DH to surgery, I chose to get lunch and then return to watch movies. Before leaving for lunch, I scoped out the location of the only power outlet in the waiting room. The reason why I chose to leave for lunch was the large signs on each wall asking that you please not have food in the waiting room, to be courteous to the other people waiting.
I returned an hour or so later and plugged in my DVD player. I did not have headphones, but at the time that I started I was the only one in the room. The TV in the room was also on, but there was no one watching. About a half hour after I started the movie, a pregnant woman and her 2 companions entered, and turned up the volume on the TV. TV is to my left, and they are on the next wall over where they could see the TV. If they were watching it. Instead, they are all talking. Every 10 minutes or so, one of them would go turn up the volume on the TV, then they would all resume talking. Not one of them is actually watching the TV.
Then after about a half hour, one woman came over and asked if I could please turn the volume down on my DVD player, as it’s disturbing them trying to watch TV. I admit that I had the sound turned up during the quieter parts of the movie, because the speaker on my DVD player is not good. But that meant that the louder parts were inadventently loud as well (the DVD was Fellowship of the Ring – think Hobbits talking quietly, then suddenly, screetching Nazgul). I promised to do what I could, so I spent the next half hour alternating the sound level so that I could hear it but try not to disturb them.
Then they all leave, only to return in about 15 minutes with large bags of fast food (at the time, hospital had a Wendy’s inside). Then, sitting directly underneath one of the large signs asking that you not have food in the waiting room, they proceeded to eat. The pregnant one joked out loud that she was pregnant and she didn’t care, she was going to have food. And they turned up the TV again. At that point, I ceased mitigating the volume on my DVD player. And if they complained again, I was going to politely point out that there were no signs about loud DVD players. 0923-08
Psst…your failure to bring headphones/ear buds does not constitute an obligation of others to accommodate your viewing enjoyment.
Bench Squatters And Their Precious Bags
I’m submitting the following to see if anyone at E-hell can help me find a polite spine and help me to resolve a problem that myself and a number of others seem to run into. Each summer my husband and I attend a gaming convention (think Dungeons and Dragons, etc). This convention is held in a great city that has a large convention space capable of fitting every possible aspect of this convention. Parts of it even spread into neighboring hotels and even the restaurants get into it. It’s truly a great event. The one issue I have run into in the convention center itself is that there’s rarely anywhere to sit. Why? Because every bench is ALWAYS taken up by one person who seems to think that their bags are more important than another human being.
It’s estimated that a person who attends this convention will walk an average of 8 miles a day, whether it’s hoofing it around the hall, or to and from your hotel to the hall to restaurants etc, so proper sit breaks are a MUST now and then. What are we supposed to do or say when we encounter someone who has taken up a whole bench between themselves and the bags of things that they have purchased? I’ve tried a polite “Hi there, I was just wondering, is anyone sitting on that half of the bench?” and the most frequent response I get is someone barely glancing up at me, snorting as if to say “Are you serious?” then sticking their nose back in whatever they were looking at. It got so bad the most recent time I attended that I started seeking out the bathrooms that had chairs for nursing mothers and sitting on those (And before anyone even asks, if anyone came in obviously in need of that chair, I gave it up).
It should also be noted that there is NO reasonable excuse for these people to be putting their bags on these benches. There is space on either side of the benches for people to put their things so that they are out of the way of any possible foot traffic. So what do we do to actually reclaim some of this seat space from people who think their bags are more important? 1114-13
The question to be asked of bench squatters is not, “Is anyone sitting there?”, but rather, “Excuse me, could you please move your bags to the floor? I need to sit on the bench.” And then stand there looking at the person expectantly and don’t stop staring until you get a civil response of some kind.
Tacky Tourists In A Strange Land
Several years ago, my sister’s husband was stationed in Germany with the Air Force. He was born in Austria, so spoke perfect German. They and their 18 month old baby were living off base in a small town, where most of the residents spoke only a little English, so my sister became fluent in German within a very short time.
My mother and I went over to visit one September while they were there. My brother-in-law had to spend a few days on rotation on the base, so the rest of us took a trip to some surrounding areas. These included a small castle that gave several tours each hour. These tours were mostly in German, with one tour per hour given in English. There was a sign posted at the ticket office that explained this and stated that no other tours would be given in English, just the one each hour. We arrived shortly after the English tour had left, and would have had to wait another hour before the next English tour. However, because my sister spoke German rather well, we decided to join one of the regular tours and she would translate for the rest of us.
Another American couple also joined this tour. We assumed, and so did the tour guide, that this couple also spoke German well enough to understand the basics. However, the guide had barely started the tour and was getting ready to move to the next area when the man from the second couple started yelling that she needed to give them the tour in English. The guide explained, in perfect English, that this was not an English tour, she could not give the tour in English because most of the rest of the tour could not understand her, and the couple was invited to wait for the next English tour. But the man continued to yell that he needed the tour in English, that they had paid good money for a tour now. If I remember correctly, my sister even offered to include them in her translation, but that wasn’t good enough for the man, he wanted the information from the guide. The guide then said that she would give them a translation after she had given the German rendition, which the man accepted. However, we soon realized that she was giving the man a very abbreviated version of her German rendition, because she still had to get the tour moving at the proper speed, which didn’t allow for two full renditions. There were still a couple of times when the next tour had to wait for us to finish up with a room and move on before they could come in.
After the tour, we gave the guide her tip, thanked her very much for her patience, and apologized for the actions of the other Americans because we didn’t want her to think that all Americans were like that. She appreciated that, and even gave us a little souvenir in return. 0201-11