Danny Wallace is a Sunday Times-bestselling author who lives in Los Angeles and Suffolk. His award-winning column in ShortList magazine reaches more than 1.3 million readers weekly. He has made comedies and documentaries for television and radio, and won the Arqiva Award for Presenter of the Year as host of the Xfm Breakfast Show with Danny Wallace. GQ magazine has called him: ‘One of Britain’s great writing talents’.
www.dannywallace.com
Passive aggression. Victim blaming. Snarky tweets. Queue-jumpers. Idiots who are #justsaying. “Banter”. Furious waitresses who refuse to sell you a hot dog … We are ruder than we’ve ever been.
In this incisive and very funny book, Danny Wallace investigates the new wave of rudeness that threatens to overwhelm us. He meets psychologists, psychiatrists, bell boys, cab drivers, bin men, barristers, politicians, a limo driver called José and at least one expert in cooked meat production. He examines Radical Honesty in Germany and road rage in LA. He even confronts his own troll. And in doing so, he brilliantly uncovers the hidden truths behind what makes us rude, whether it’s catching, and how even one flippant remark can snowball into disaster.
From the mayor in Bogotá who recruited an army of mimes to highlight inconsiderate driving, to the jihadist who launched a blistering attack on the “bad manners” of his fellow ISIS militants, this is an eye-opening and often hilarious exploration of the way humans work and why it is time for an anti-rudeness revolution.
Awkward Situations for Men
Charlotte Street
Danny Wallace and the Centre of the Universe
Friends Like These
Join Me
Random Acts of Kindness
What Not to Do and How to Do It
Who is Tom Ditto?
Yes Man
For Mum and Dad
(The only two people I can honestly say
I’ve never seen be rude to anyone.)
In 2015, after 27-year-old Omar Hussain left his job at a Morrisons supermarket in Buckinghamshire and fled the United Kingdom to join the radical terrorist jihadist group ISIS, he was extraordinarily disappointed to find out how rude they all were.
We all get annoyed at our colleagues from time to time, but for Omar Hussain the everyday rudeness displayed by those simultaneously plotting to bring down the very tenets of Western civilisation was a step too far.
In a blog he wrote in his first few months in the desert, he complained in no uncertain terms about the ‘bad manners’ of his fellow radicalised death-cult militants.
Under a series of numbered headings on Tumblr, the bearded and bespectacled Hussain launched a blistering attack on Arab administrative skills.
‘There is no queue in any of their offices,’ wrote the furious Briton. ‘You could be waiting in line for half an hour and then another Arab would come and push in the queue and go straight in.’
When serving his peers dinner after a long day of terrorist training in the desert, Omar was shocked to be ‘pounced upon by everyone in the room. I therefore refused to give anyone food until every single one of them was sitting down in their seats. Unfortunately, I had to treat them like primary school students.’
Poor Omar just hadn’t known what he was letting himself in for. In subsequent blogs and tweets, you can tell he was becoming withdrawn. He talks of loneliness; he has trouble peeling potatoes; he spends his free time trying to find chocolates or feeding a local cat called Lucy.
What Omar perceived as the rudeness of others really affected him: this kind of behaviour was not what he signed up to ISIS for, and it was wearing him down.
It only got worse.
‘In the West, it is common knowledge to walk out of a room wearing the same pair of shoes that you wore while entering the room. Nay, it is common sense!’ he wrote at one point, and you know someone’s annoyed when they use words like nay. ‘However, here in Sham, our Syrian brothers […] believe that everyone can wear each other’s footwear. Sometimes you would enter a building and when leaving, you would see the person with your shoes walking 100 yards ahead of you and it can be quite irritating.’
Of course, these things happen in war. But Omar suddenly found himself in a world in which men would simply stand three feet away and stare at him while saying nothing, and even where terrorists would ‘casually take your phone off charge to charge their own phone’.
Omar expected better of ISIS. He didn’t like how they would be so ‘childish in their dealings and mannerisms’, nor how they would rifle through other people’s property without asking first. They were always invading his space, and they talked far too loudly when he was trying to sleep.
As far as he could tell, they didn’t find their own behaviour rude at all.
We all have our own standards when it comes to rudeness.
Politeness is extremely important to me, though sometimes I wonder if I set the bar too high.
I feel rude if I sneeze on a plane. I have lost count of the number of times I have apologised to bins or lampposts if I’ve walked into them. If a dog looks my way as I walk through a park, I feel ashamed if I don’t smile or nod a hello. I don’t think I’d last five minutes with ISIS before I’d be straight to Human Resources!
But never was I more aware of my own standards of rudeness than on the day – and immediate aftermath – of what we’ll call ‘the Hotdog Incident’.
All I wanted was a sausage. What I got instead was an afternoon of incredible stress and the desire to do something about it. The desire, as it would turn out, to write this book. Initially I tried to exorcise my demons by composing a scathing 200-word review. But 200 words did nothing. There was too much I still wanted to say – and know. Something that began as a little silly took on a serious edge. What started as a few print-outs left by my bed in London soon became documents in ring-binders arranged in my office.
And all of this purely to try and understand exactly what happened between me and a complete stranger over an emulsified sausage.
In the following months, as my interest in the question of why people are rude became an obsession – and winning an argument became writing a book – I would start to realise that we are on the edge of something truly dangerous. I found myself calling upon the expertise of behavioural psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, bell boys, cab drivers, removals men, sociologists, journalists, ethicists, political strategists, neurologists, barristers, baristas, waiters, politicians, NASA scientists, a limo driver called José and at least one expert in cooked meat production.
Simultaneously, as I read more studies and familiarised myself with a whole new world of research and investigation, I began to discover I was part of a hidden community of ‘rudeness nerds’, working diligently in the shadows to figure out why we are the way we are – and what it means.
And it’s not pretty.
I’ll be honest with you: I thought I had a pretty good handle on rudeness. What I wasn’t expecting to find was what a threat it poses to our happiness – and maybe even to our continued existence on this planet. Its effects are potent, damaging and, scariest of all, contagious. In the coming pages, I’ll show you how rudeness affects the way our brains work, how it clouds our judgement and how it worsens our choices. We’ll see how experiencing it can make us less effective at our jobs, and make us worse fathers and mothers, sons, daughters and friends. We’ll meet people who’ll show us how rudeness can stop us trusting, and make us barbed, suspicious and vicious. How those in power use it to keep us down.
If any of the things I’ve just told you happened because of something scientifically traceable – a mosquito bite, say, or a worm scratch – I am certain the world’s governments would leap into immediate action. There would be constant panic and 24-hour rolling news coverage and someone would have quarantined Simon Cowell.
But as it is, for now it’s just you, me, and this book.
Think about that for a second.
One thing before we get started. This is not a book about etiquette. I couldn’t care less about etiquette. You can burn every etiquette book in the world as far as I’m concerned, so long as it’s done safely and not downwind of anybody trying to enjoy their garden. I don’t think we need to pull out chairs for people. If there’s a puddle, I’m not going to take off my brand new cape and lay it down for you to step on, though if I were wearing a cape in the first place you’d have every right to be rude to me.
However, I do think if someone’s walking through a door behind us we could hold it open for them. I do think if we’re queuing in a Syrian post office, we should absolutely wait our turn, and if a radical extremist tries to elbow his way to the front, we have every right to sigh and tut.
That’s the difference between etiquette and politeness. Etiquette is outdated; politeness is all we need, and this book is both a warning and a rallying cry for civility. We need politeness because it is right, it lifts our spirits, it makes things better, it lubricates the day and helps everything run smoother.
And we need it now more than ever, because things are getting worse.
Don’t tell me you haven’t felt it too. This ‘New Rudeness’ is global. It’s in the air, it pours out of our phones, tumbles from our TVs, dominates the cultural conversation and I firmly believe it threatens to overwhelm us.
Passive aggression. Road rage. Below-the-line commenters. Spitters. Queue-jumpers. People who are #justsaying or Only Being Honest or Not Being Funny But.
We seem more stressed, more time-pressed, tired, fed up, angry and put upon. We seem more resentful, envious, self-obsessed, racist and, yes, sad. We think less, react more, and run and jump to conclusions just so we have one, where once we might have ambled to see what happened along the way. We are self-entitled, knee-jerking, know-it-all thunderdicks.
We are ruder than we’ve ever been, and the train is running away.
You get one nasty TV judge, and suddenly they can’t commission a single show without one. You give one awful person a newspaper column, wait until he or she writes something that in civilised countries would be rightly deemed sociopathic, and we don’t fire them; we give them a chat show on a minority satellite channel. We find ourselves at a point in time where suddenly we admire politicians who come up with put-downs instead of policies. Why? Because we find them ‘refreshing’. We mistake their rudeness for ‘honesty’, because we confuse ‘honesty’ with ‘opinion’, in much the same way as bores at dinner parties confuse cynicism with wit.
Of course, it’s tempting to think only ‘other people’ are rude. But the truth is, we’re all at it.fn1
Some go out of their way to be rude, like the coal-hearted newspaper columnist desperately scrabbling around on deadline for thuggish ways to insult whoever’s looking weak, just so one day she can line her own coffin with slightly more expensive felt. Like the millionaires on Saturday-night TV making more money and generating more fame by humiliating those with mental health problems who just want a tiny slice of the hopeless dream they’re being sold by the very people who’ll never give it to them.
I’ll touch on those people – because of their influence and because I can’t stand them and because it’ll be fun – but thanks to the meat-based Incident that could just as easily have happened to you, or your mother, or your neighbour’s ex-wife, I want to focus on the everydayness of rudeness too. The tedious, beige mundanity of a rudeness that is now everywhere.
The wearing, draining, energy-sapping pointlessness of it all.
The New Rudeness is like a suffocating blanket, and this book an attempt to pull back the covers. I think we are at a point in time where we reward the wrong things. We celebrate incivility, we admire it, we joyfully kick our legs and laugh as we actively sink ourselves deeper into the quicksand of society’s lowest cultural ebb.
Let’s have fun finding out why!
Human beings are fundamentally good. We’re a terrific bunch. But we slip up all the time. And I know what you’re thinking. Something pretty terrible must have happened to me to make me go this far, so far that I had to write a whole book on the subject.
And you’d be right.
That something terrible was the Hotdog Incident.
Allow me, please, to paint you a picture of beauty and serenity.
A small middle-class town – one I won’t name – on a typical British summer bank-holiday weekend. By which I mean in the past 24 hours there had been a genuine risk of death by hailstone.
Lunchtime. Crisp air had worn holes in our stomachs, and in among the cobbles and chip shops and delis, and abandoned, turned-up Fairtrade organic ice-cream cones, I led my small family towards something I’d spotted through the thin drizzle.
A tiny diner.
A freshly painted beacon of hope in muted, middle-class tones.
‘Let’s get a hotdog!’ said my five-year-old son, which is not unusual for him.
‘Yeah! Let’s get a hotdog!’ I replied, which is not unusual for me.
So I made an important decision. This would be where the family had lunch. This would be where we’d buy hotdogs.
This would be a mistake.
‘You have to pay up front,’ said the woman behind the counter, hands on hips, barely looking at me, already somehow aggrieved.
She was in the midst of middle age and wearing her hair in a bun, over heavy eyeshadow and two carefully painted pursed red lips.
I looked at the price of our hotdogs. They were expensive. But we were hungry and already here and I did as I was told and paid up front, even though you don’t pay for food up front.
There were no seats, and no ideas were offered, so we took a table outside and waited in the wind.
‘This weather is wonderfully bracing!’ said my son, though he phrased it ‘I’m cold.’
I reassured him we’d have our hotdogs soon. I’d had hotdogs before. Hotdogs take no time.
Through the window, bored, listless families stared past each other. A kid toyed with his phone. His mum made him put it away but, when he did, she didn’t speak to him.
I noticed none of them had any food.
‘None of those people have any food,’ I mumbled, as grey clouds seemed to gather above me.
The woman in the eyeshadow at the counter had disappeared.
Twenty-five minutes passed.
‘Just wondering about my son’s hotdog!’ I said, walking cheerfully inside when I spotted the woman was back.
She scowled.
Then she put both hands on the counter, and leaned closer, and it got worse.
‘There are TWO OTHER TABLES AHEAD OF YOU,’ she barked, eyes cold. ‘And we COOK TO ORDER.’
This was not the response I was expecting.
‘Cool!’ I said, surprised at the volume of her response and the approach, and I rushed back outside, to my wife.
‘So there are two other tables ahead of us,’ I told her, as she rearranged our baby to prevent frostbite. ‘And the thing is, they cook to order.’
‘What does that mean?’ she said. ‘Maybe it means we should go somewhere else.’
She was right.
But wait.
‘I had to pay up front!’ I remembered. ‘It was like taking out a second mortgage.’
Why had this woman made us pay for our food before we had our food? She had trapped us!
‘Maybe I’ll go in and ask,’ said my wife.
‘No!’ I said, because I’m the dad, and I’d already started this.
The woman bristled as she sensed my tiptoeing. She did not look up, preferring instead to try and burn a hole in her order book through wilful staring alone.
‘Hi, uh, it’s just that if we could get a rough estimate on time,’ I tried, trying not to wake the beast, ‘it would really help us.’
‘TEN MINUTES!’ she yelled, throwing her book down. ‘You’ll have EVERYTHING in TEN MINUTES!’
It was like instead of my polite and staggered sentences she thought I’d kicked the door in, taken my trousers down, and yelled ‘Hey dickhead! Cook me a sausage!’
Behind her, a silent woman joylessly shunted meat round a grill. She looked like one big sigh.
‘So should I wait …’
‘YES,’ she said, indicating the door.
Back outside, I clapped my hands together and pretended everything was absolutely fantastic.
‘Perfect!’ I said. ‘Everything in ten minutes!’
My son looked at me like I’d just said I enjoy stamping on badgers. Ten minutes is six weeks in kid years.
I scrabbled about in my pocket for something for him to play with. I gave him an old train ticket. He looked at it and handed it back.
Twenty minutes later and still nothing had happened.
Nothing.
Well, a seagull briefly landed on a bin, but that’s not the same as getting a hotdog.
‘We’ll soon be approaching an hour!’ I said in disbelief, but trying to remain positive, because I really didn’t want to go back in again.
And then – a miracle!
A teenage waitress silently walked out with a plate.
‘Hi,’ I tried, but word had obviously spread. The girl did not even look me in the eye. I was obviously a troublemaker.
She dropped the plate to the table and on it sat a tiny, overcooked, junior hotdog.
It looked embarrassed to be there.
Next to it were two wet leaves and a single cherry tomato.
‘Oh God,’ I thought, heart sinking. ‘I’m going to have to complain.’
Inside, diners looked at us, sadly.
I glanced down and saw my son had eaten half his hotdog already. Maybe this would all be over soon.
‘So where’s our food?’ asked my wife.
‘Oh God,’ I thought again.
I reasoned that I needed a human shield so took my son with me for protection. But the very second I opened the door and activated its tinkle – a tinkle that had long since lost all sense of joy – the woman began physically to seethe.
In a cartoon, she’d have had steam coming out of her ears.
Somehow, by asking where a hotdog I’d already bought was, I had become the country’s most difficult customer. I would not have been surprised to have turned on my television that night to see this woman being interviewed about me.
‘You don’t understand how it works,’ she barked as I got nearer, voice rising, already incandescent at my cheek. ‘We COOK everything TO ORDER.’
My son took a step back.
It was time for me to take a step forward.
‘Look, we’ve been outside for an hour,’ I said, trying to sound firm. ‘I’m just asking for updates.’
‘You’ve been outside TWENTY MINUTES,’ she said. ‘I know because I checked.’
She made a ‘Ha!’ face.
The whole place fell silent.
I’ve seen the films; this was becoming a stand-off.
‘It’s been a lot longer than twenty minutes,’ I said, gaining confidence. Part of me could feel the room on my side. Enough for me to try raising my voice. ‘It’s been an HOUR!’
She closed her eyes, revealing acres more eyeshadow.
‘It has not been an HOUR,’ she said, opening them again, knuckles whitening against the counter’s edge, ‘and YOU DON’T KNOW HOW IT WORKS!’
‘I DO know how it works!’
‘WE COOK EVERYTHING TO ORDER!’
‘Why do you keep SAYING THAT?’ I yelled, throwing my hands up in the air. ‘Well done on cooking to order! JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER RESTAURANT IN THE WORLD!’
My son was staring up at me now; not her.
‘Do you think I’ve never ordered something and then they COOKED IT? I’ve done that almost everywhere. It’s NOT AS IMPRESSIVE AS YOU THINK!’
‘You’ve been here twenty minutes,’ she hissed again, ignoring my exceptional point, but everyone here knew this was a lie. The brilliance of it, though, was that it was impossible to prove I’d been there an hour.
But wait!
‘My receipt!’ I said, and I pulled it from my pocket and held it aloft, like Sherlock Holmes producing the crucial evidence at the last possible second. She made me pay up front! Hoisted with her own petard!
‘According to this I’ve been here one hour and one minute!’
I’m a genius!
‘And one hour and one minute,’ I added confidently, ‘is too long to wait for a hotdog!’fn1
The woman let out a bitter laugh. She was beaten, she knew it, but there was time for one parting shot, as she scowled and pointed at my wife and baby shivering outside and said, ‘You’re probably the sort of people who queue up for 40 minutes for FISH AND CHIPS.’
Now, to this day I have absolutely no idea what that meant, but let me tell you, it sounded very insulting.
‘Right!’ I said, deciding to regain control, my mind now sharpened and the way forward clear in my head. ‘Cancel it! I want to cancel my order!’
Ha!
‘You can’t!’ she spat.
‘I can!’ I said. Consumer rights! ‘I want a refund!’
‘You can’t have one,’ she smirked. ‘Because your cheeseburger is ready.’
I DIDN’T ORDER A CHEESEBURGER!
Oh, hang on, my wife did.
The woman prodded a cheeseburger towards me with one long nail. It was in a little plastic basket. But the woman’s face said it all: she thought she had won. Around us, people stared, watching the spectacle, enjoying the power struggle, but none yet willing to lend a hand.
‘Well, I’ll pay for the cheeseburger and my son’s hotdog, then,’ I countered. ‘But I want a refund on my hotdog.’
And then something happened.
It was like something exploded behind her eyes.
Her shoulders quivered, and she shook her head, and she did the unbelievable.
She looked at me and said, ‘Actually, do you know what? You can’t have it.’
She dragged the cheeseburger back towards her.
She was keeping the cheeseburger!
‘I WANT YOU OUT!’ she yelled.
‘You want me out?’
‘I’m not doing this,’ she said, hands on hips, head shaking. ‘You can’t have your hotdog!’
‘But I’ve paid for that hotdog!’
‘No. I’m not having this. OUT.’
What the …? I – a man who tries to be polite, a bewildered man, a man who just wondered where his hotdog was – was being thrown out of a diner!
With no hotdog!
In front of my son!
I watched in disbelief as she furiously tossed coins onto the counter instead of hotdogs. And as I scrabbled to pick up the price of a refunded reconstituted sausage, and turned and began to walk, I caught sight of her ‘TIPS’ jar and almost laughed. My head was confused and spinning from the injustice, from the unwarranted aggression, from the unexpectedness of it all. Why was she being so RUDE?
I noticed my hand begin to tremble. This woman had broken the rules. This woman had broken the rules.
‘You think you know how it works,’ she muttered again. ‘But you don’t!’
‘You think you can cook a hotdog, but you can’t!’
‘WE COOK TO ORDER!’
‘You DON’T COOK AT ALL!’
‘Go eat some FISH AND CHIPS!’ she yelled, and at last I reached the door.
‘Maybe if you didn’t spend so long getting ready every morning,’ I spat back, pointing at her hair, her eyeshadow, her pursed red lips, ‘you could put the hotdogs on!’
My cheeks were burning, my head was throbbing, one hand was shaking, and as I found myself outside in cold and spitting rain I had a moment of complete and absolute clarity …
What was I doing?
What the hell was I doing?
All I’d wanted was a hotdog. And now here I was trembling in the rain. I had no idea what my next move was supposed to be. Nothing made sense. How had it come to this, and so quickly? Was there anything that woman or I could have done to avoid this situation?
Well, obviously there was.
She could have cooked a fucking hotdog.
But what on Earth was I teaching my son?
‘They’re very rude,’ said my little boy to a stranger outside, as we gathered our things, watched by all inside, and as I struggled, confused, to focus on whatever I was supposed to do next. ‘I didn’t even like my hotdog.’
SUGGESTED ACTIVITY:
With your friend, why not undertake the following role play?
One of you should pretend to be a person who wishes to buy a hotdog.
The other should pretend to be a person whose job it is to sell hotdogs.
See if you can work together to find a solution that solves both problems while avoiding conflict.
You have 3 attempts and 90 minutes.
Not long ago, I read a book called Dying to Wake Up: A Doctor’s Voyage into the Afterlife and the Wisdom He Brought Back.
In it, the former cardiac anaesthesiologist Dr Rajiv Parti recalls the incredibly unusual events of 23 December 2010.
Rushed to UCLA Hospital suffering from a severe infection, Parti found himself in dire need of emergency surgery and was immediately put under.
Not long after, Dr Rajiv Parti died.
The surgeons acted swiftly. They did what surgeons do. They brought him back.
But just before they did, he says, some very strange things happened to him.
First, his world was plunged into complete darkness, and moments after that he found himself travelling to another realm entirely.
When he looked up, Dr Parti says he was shocked to see a big black cloud, flashing in the distance from lightning. There followed loud and terrifying rolls of thunder.
And then came the screams.
Loud, piercing screams of anguish and torture. Dr Parti realised he was surrounded by burning, tormented souls that began to writhe around him, engulfed in a fierce and unstoppable fire that now raged all around.
Then someone made him lie on a bed of nails, he says, which really hurt.
He was confused; disoriented; poked with needles. And then he was made to walk towards a fiery canyon, he says, thick smoke coating his nostrils and scratching at his lungs.
From there, high up on the edge of some kind of precipice, in a world that smelled of burning meat, he was made to survey all the many horrors that lay beneath.
Dr Rajiv Parti was amazed to find himself, in his own words, at the lip of hell.
In subsequent press interviews about his day in hell, there’s even been talk of strange horned demons with crooked teeth scurrying around, seemingly threatening him with an eternity of pain, though oddly these didn’t make the book.
However, here’s the point.
Despite all that – despite the horned demons and the terrifying screams of anguish and the beds of nails – do you know what was the first thing that occurred to Dr Rajiv Parti?
The very first thought he had, as he surveyed vast, endless burning fields of agonised bodies and human suffering and soul-scarring screams?
He says he thought about how rude he’d been to a woman who’d come to see him about her arthritis recently.
That’s what he thought about. He thought about how rude he’d been.
He’d been really dismissive, and he shouldn’t have been. He hadn’t paid attention to her at all as she talked. He just wanted to get on with his day. He’d really been ever so brusque.
And as he stood at the very lip of hell, and as Satan himself must have been warming up his sulphuric fork and wonky-teethed demons began circling around him, Dr Rajiv Parti stared into the raging heart of hellfire and thought about all the other times he’d been a bit rude to people.
Answer this: when was someone last rude to you?
I bet you remember very well, and I bet you told other people about it. No one wants to hear about a great holiday you had, where your flights were upgraded and the hotel gave you a suite and the weather was beautiful and the drinks were free and you got to know your favourite rock band who were staying at the same place and they invited you to New York to sing on their next album.
But if some guy on a train spilled your coffee and just went back to reading his newspaper without apologising – that’s a story.
‘What did you do?’ your friends will ask, wide-eyed. ‘Did you say something?’
Each of us can recall with startling accuracy minor rudenesses thrust our way by strangers in the past. Perhaps we cringe when we think of times we know for sure we were needlessly rude to someone else. But a story about rudeness has the power to muscle its way to the front of any conversation. Imagine a scientist arriving at a TV studio in order to announce a cure for all known diseases. I am absolutely certain that as they got their notes together and prepared for the most important speech of their life, they’d still take a moment to tell the bloke who took their jacket what an absolute tit their taxi driver was.
Sharing stories is a fundamental part of the human experience, and no day-to-day stories are more powerful or relatable than stories of injustice and rudeness, because when a stranger is suddenly and inexplicably rude, they break the rules and burn a bad memory onto your hard drive.
We are fascinated by rude behaviour. We listen to our friends recount their tales of bad service or angry commuters with glee. We clap our hands on the table and shout ‘GOOD!’ when we hear they stood up for themselves. We clap our hands on the table and shout ‘NO!’ when we find out they did nothing.
When the Hotdog Incident occurred, I found myself talking about it a lot. I needed to offload. It was an experience that didn’t just stay with me; it pretty much moved in.
And can I tell you something? Within 24 hours, I had done something absolutely insane.
As I drove past the diner again – and even though it was now empty and dark and closed – I gave it the finger.
I flipped off a building.
Instinctively.
A 38-year-old man.
This was not normal.
And what must the building have thought? ‘For 60 years I have stood proud on this corner, serving the community, never saying a word, never once a complaint – and then I get flipped off by an early middle-aged man in a Volvo.’
It doesn’t stop there.
Even as we headed back to London, I felt affected. I kept saying things to my wife about that woman. I kept using the word ‘unbelievable’ in various ways. ‘Unbelievably rude!’; ‘Unbelievable behaviour!’; ‘Unbelievable!’
I kept protesting my innocence, often completely out of the blue. ‘I did nothing wrong!’ I’d suddenly shout, as a new thought struck me or the injustice hit me again.
The long motorway drive did nothing to rid me of my frustration. In fact, now I decided that on some level other drivers were going out of their way to get in my way. We hit traffic jams that compounded my mood. I sneered at other cars. I seethed. And when I got home, and span the cap off a bottle of wine so quickly I’m surprised it didn’t set something on fire, I did something worse than flipping off a building.
I went online.
I looked at TripAdvisor for pretty much the first time in my life.
I signed up.
And I wrote a withering review.
Another way of putting this is: I was obsessing.
Rudeness had me.
But at least know this: the night I got home and wrote that review and drank wine and pressed ‘Publish’ and clicked ‘Refresh’ and ‘Refresh’ and ‘Refresh’ a few hundred times willing my harsh words to appear, I also took a good hard look at myself.
I am not, by nature, an angry man. But now I had found an anger. A snarling rage, a sense of injustice and impotence and a hunger for revenge.
I can’t blame the Hotdog Incident on its own. Looking back, perhaps it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was just one heightened rudeness too far in a city and world and civilisation I felt had become less … civil. The more I rolled the events around in my head, the more other examples started crashing in on me. Examples I’d written off as being part of a bad day or tried to ignore.
Rude people in restaurants. On the bus. That executive at that dinner in Edinburgh that time. That six-year-old in the park who swore at my son. Bitchy emails. Unnecessary insults.
All of it came tumbling down – a brief personal history of rudeness – and as my wife went to bed and I sat up late, I realised it was making me unhappy. I didn’t want to be unhappy.
Something had been smouldering. But now the idea caught fire.
Maybe I could do something about all this. Maybe I could use this anger. Maybe I could try and understand why these things happen to us all. Maybe I could start with the Hotdog Incident. I could unpack it, unpick it, look at it from every angle. And maybe by doing so I could somehow put it right. For hotdog lovers everywhere.
So yes, I took a good hard look at myself that night.
And then I decided to take a good hard look at you, too.
As the first few days passed, and I began, I had another realisation. How could I judge where we should be if I didn’t know where we already were?
So I did something that at the time felt entirely natural.
I picked up the phone and approached a leading national polling company.
In return for several thousand pounds, they told me they could conduct a countrywide survey of 2,000 people aged 18 and over on ‘Rudeness and Its Effects in Everyday Life’.
Immediately and excitedly I began writing the questions for what would soon become known in my household as ‘The Wallace Report’. This would be my own state-of-the-nation survey. Because if, as I suspected, rudeness is getting worse, then how bad is it already?
I had so much I wanted to know because I suspect in some ways I wanted to know if I was still normal.
Is it normal to want revenge? Is it normal to be so affected by something as trivial as an argument over a hotdog?
Within a week, the results were back (see the end of the book for the full Wallace Report). I threw myself into them. Immediately I discovered some worrying things.
Try this one for size.
Thirty-eight per cent of people surveyed said that they themselves had been rude to someone in the last seven days.
That is simply not good enough. Those people are letting the rest of us down.
Worse, a little over one in five (21 per cent) actually consider themselves to be a rude person. That’s how they think of themselves. ‘Rude.’ As a defining characteristic. Like a badge of honour. Fine, but I wouldn’t open your match.com profile with it.
True, that still leaves nearly 80 per cent who, like you and me, say they’re just trying to get on, stay true to our unwritten social contracts, and are therefore surprised and bewildered when rudeness is foisted upon them. But still.
I pored and pored over The Wallace Report, and found it fascinating, because it focuses not just on those big moments, but on smaller, more specific ones too. Rather than overwhelm you, I’m going to pepper the answers of the public throughout this book to give some sense of our present-day attitudes to the New Rudeness that sweeps across our world the way a drunk clown sweeps across the first row of a circus audience, throwing not delightful buckets of glitter our way, but spraying us instead with a hosepipe full of his own shit.
I’m sorry if you found that rude.
But how does rudeness sweep across the world?
Does rudeness spread?
Incidentally, I emailed Dr Rajiv Parti on a number of occasions to ask him if he’d be willing to talk with me about that evening spent at the lip of hell when he realised he would have to mend his ways, but so far he has rudely ignored me.
You have to wonder what it’s going to take with that guy.
On 9 August 2010, JetBlue Airways flight 1052 from Pittsburgh touched down in New York City, and flight attendant Steven Slater picked up the public address system to make an announcement.
The announcement was quite unusual.
He’d had enough, he said. He’d had enough of one rude passenger on the flight in particular, and he’d had enough of rude passengers in general.
He’d been in this business nearly 20 years, he said, though he used more swear words – and he could take no more.
‘I’m done!’ he yelled.
And then he grabbed two beers from the drinks trolley, pulled open the door, activated the emergency slide and jumped out of the plane.
Stunned passengers watched him bounce down the chute, then stand up and stroll away, across the tarmac, beers in hand.
And an American folk hero was born.
Steven Slater had done what everyone in the service industry fantasises about doing when faced with a rude public – he had resigned in the most spectacular way possible. He would make news across the world. His story would be mentioned on every late-night talk show to huge cheers from the crowd. He started a national conversation about rudeness in the workplace. People would make T-shirts with his face on. He would be branded a champion of the working man. He would also be suspended and receive a $10,000 charge for repacking the slide.
His colleagues said later that Steven Slater had been having ‘a really bad day’. Admittedly, it got worse when a reported 50 police officers turned up at his house to arrest him.
Yet it all added to the sense of a bona fide people’s champion: here was a normal guy pushed to the limits through no fault of his own.
Considering my embarrassing/justified outbursts when arguing about hotdogs, I considered whether I might be like Steven Slater. Maybe I too was just a man who’d been pushed too far, like in a middle-class, meat-based Falling Down.
What’s interesting is that maybe – just maybe – that small incident in that little diner that day could have global ramifications.
In Roger Hargreaves’s classic text on civility, Mr Rude, a very rude man named Mr Rude stops being so rude when a lovely man named Mr Happy just keeps smiling at him.
Sorry for the spoiler, but it’s a wonderful lesson, though not one likely to catch on any time soon on planet Earth.
The truth about rudeness turns out to be a little more complex. And as I soon discovered, there are others as interested in this as I am. Scientists, psychologists and academics who see rudeness not just as an amusing character trait in a sitcom hotelier, but as something to be taken seriously and rigorously investigated.
Some days it just feels like rudeness is in the air. And that’s closer to the truth than you might think.
One recent study, in fact, led by Trevor Foulk at the University of Florida, suggests that rudeness is contagious. Literally. It spreads just the same way the common cold spreads.
So that’s what’s dangerous about the backhanded compliment in the office, the sarcastic sneer, the unnecessary outburst to an innocent but on-the-edge flight attendant: they’re catching. They’re catching faster than you’d catch something off Mr Sneeze.
If you’ve been rude to someone recently, don’t beat yourself up. You probably caught it. And becoming a carrier is worryingly simple: you just need to have seen some rudeness.
You start to understand how serious this might be when you consider that the more people who see that same moment of rudeness, the more carriers there suddenly are.
From now on, let’s call the woman who was rude to me ‘Madam Hotdog’. Partly because that describes her in a very easy and shorthand way, and partly because she’d hate it. Now let’s say ten people in that diner saw Madam Hotdog being rude to me.
Those ten witnesses are now – according to the latest behavioural science – much more likely to be rude to someone else.
And if they are, and if each of those ten subsequent moments of rudeness is witnessed by a fresh ten people, you start to see how the Butterfly Effect might just take place, and how my hotdog moment might still prove to be the turning point that eventually brings down the very foundations of Western society.
That day, Madam Hotdog and I actively made the innocent bystanders in that diner ruder by unwittingly releasing a fresh puff of rudeness, there to be observed and ‘caught’ and spread by others. How?
‘When people come into contact with rudeness,’ says Trevor Foulk, when I put this to him, because I’d suddenly realised I had the power to put things to people, ‘the part of the brain that processes rudeness “wakes up” a little bit …’
Foulk says it’s this non-conscious stirring of your rudeness antennae that means if someone’s rude to you, it’s now more likely that the next time you find yourself talking with somebody, you’ll be primed for both giving and sensing rudeness yourself.1
I agree with you: it sounds crazy. It sounds unlikely we’re that simple; that you will literally be rude to the next person you talk to because your Snidey Sense has tingled. What if it’s a vicar or a weeping orphan? But just as the Hotdog Incident proved to me as I became angrier and grouchier and quicker to judge, the rudeness is now within you, nearer the surface than it was, and it takes far less for it to bubble up and spill over into the next conversation, encounter or stand-off.
What’s scary is that no matter who you think you are, your own rudeness is right there, waiting for someone to needle you, and even if you know this, controlling it is more or less beyond you. Whatever thin layer of civility we have is easily scraped and grazed. Gaps start to appear. You begin to perceive the world in a different way: you begin to see rudeness where none was intended, and then you act rudely yourself. You don’t even have to witness rudeness repeatedly: one moment of exposure is enough. It’s like someone sneezing directly in your face.
Rudeness is airborne; a hidden yawn, passed from person to person until it stretches around the world.
And it happens all the time. The Wallace Report tells us that British people feel someone’s been unnecessarily rude to them an average of twice a week. That’s 104 times a year. And each time it happens, know this: it makes you a little bit ruder too.
Foulk and his colleagues had their report published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, and in it they explained a number of experiments they’d undertaken.
In one of them, a group of volunteers was happily working away in an office when an actor walked in to join them, as if he was a late participant. He was subjected to a moderate, scripted diatribe by the person in charge.
‘What is it with you?’ the acting man acted, aggressively. ‘You arrive late, you’re irresponsible. Look at you; how do you expect to hold down a job in the real world? I need you to leave.’
Cue awkward looks and quiet shuffles.
But it was then that the study really began, and here is what it showed.
The people who witnessed the outburst became not only less effective at the work, but also more sensitive to rudeness in general. Which means that even if someone else’s subsequent behaviour was pretty neutral, it was more likely to have been found ‘rude’ by that group of people. A moment like that deeply affects us. It makes us more cynical of other people, warier of their motivations. Once someone has been affected or infected by rudeness, that little smiley face, or that kiss at the end of the email, is far more likely to be seen as sarcastic or aggressive.
Yes. An aggressive kiss.
The idea that we can ‘catch’ behaviours has been around a while, and it’s not just to do with rudeness. Here’s a happy example for your next dinner party: if a friend of yours has recently divorced their partner, you are now 75 per cent more likely to get divorced yourself.2 You’re welcome.
As people, we learn from each other and bolster each other’s behaviour either consciously or subconsciously. Like a computer virus, rudeness buries itself deep in our minds and skulks around in the shadows.
To demonstrate this, at one point Foulk and his team showed a video to a group of study participants. The video showed someone in an office being unnecessarily rude to a colleague. Another group of students was shown a perfectly polite video of perfectly normal office people being perfectly ordinary with one another. Both groups were then asked to reply to an email, which was written in neutral tones. The group that had witnessed the rudeness were far more likely to reply to this very everyday email with genuine hostility.
This happens to us all. I once received a perfectly neutral email asking me when I planned to deliver some work, and ended ‘Many thanks’ with a full stop on the end.
This is what it said:
If you could get me that document today that would be great. Many thanks.
It nearly drove me to despair.
‘How dare they write “Many thanks” with a full stop!?’ I remember thinking. ‘It’s so passive aggressive! Dismissive! Presumptuous! Oh, don’t ask for the document, oh no. Just assume I’ll send it. Oh, “you’ll do exactly what I say, Many thanks, full stop”. Screw this guy!’
In reality, it is theoretically possible he was simply ending an efficient email using a globally recognised term and correct punctuation. Nevertheless, I found it rude. And think about that phrase: I found it rude.
Maybe I found it because I was looking for it.
Foulk and friends suggest the toxic effect of rudeness – some actually call it a neurotoxin – lasts an entire week. It can spread like wildfire around a contained office, leading to general hostility, lower morale, poorer performance and worse coffee.
I’m serious about that. The people who witnessed that latecomer getting told off made more mistakes in simple tasks afterwards.
In fact, it’s been shown that even when the rude behaviour is mild at best, it impairs a person’s basic ability to think.
This is why often our first reaction to rudeness is to be flustered.
The day of the Hotdog Incident? I couldn’t think at first. The rules had been changed. I was going in for one thing, then dealing with another. I had to take a moment to change gear.
Generally, when surprised by rudeness, we need that moment to process; we need to delve deep into the files at the back of our minds and pull out a barely used instruction manual.
But Foulk would argue that the rudeness I experienced that day might not have been randomly aggressive at all. It could simply have been a natural response, triggered by some other event that could easily have happened five minutes, or five days, before.
Maybe the woman just couldn’t help it. She was infected.
In a parallel study, doctors Amir Erez and Christine Porath tested three different ‘rudeness’ scenarios involving 275 students.3 The students had to brainstorm creative uses for a brick.
There were other things they had to do, like anagrams, but creative uses for a brick was my favourite.
Again, the idea of a latecomer was used because we’ve all been late for something and it’s easy to relate both to being late and to being annoyed at someone’s lateness.
This guy showed up six minutes later than he was supposed to, made his excuses and was immediately dismissed and sent away. That’s all the control group saw.
But another group saw the latecomer dismissed, followed by the experimenter going crazy, rudely complaining about how all the students at the University of Southern California were completely unprofessional compared to those at other universities.
A further bunch of students arrived to be greeted by a passive-aggressive person at a desk saying ‘Can’t you read? There is a SIGN on the door that tells you the experiment will be elsewhere. But you didn’t even bother to look at the door, did you? Instead, you preferred to disturb me and you can clearly see that I am busy. I am not a secretary here; I am a busy professor!’
I think describing yourself as a busy professor is not something a busy professor would do. Imagine a policeman walking around saying, ‘I am a busy policeman!’ Are you, mate? Because you definitely sound like you’ve just found a uniform somewhere.
Then there was a final group who were asked just to imagine these scenarios.
Compared to the control groups who, remember, were unaware of any of this rude behaviour, the groups that witnessed rudeness did far worse on their tasks.
Somehow, that rudeness created a roadblock in their minds.
Those who witnessed the latecomer being talked about rudely solved 33 per cent fewer anagrams and came up with nearly 40 per cent fewer ideas for creative uses for a brick.
Those who met our ‘busy professor’ – who still sounds like he was wearing a trench coat and a fake moustache – were 61 per cent worse at anagrams and produced 58 per cent fewer ideas for unusual brick use than those who had not been treated rudely at all.
Frighteningly, even those who just imagined incivility suffered.
Just imagining rudeness makes you worse at thinking up uses for a brick.
This could decimate our building trade. Which is why it’s so lucky builders have such a reputation for polite chit-chat and manners.
Now you can see why businesses are so keen to train their managers not to offend anyone when giving out even the mildest criticism: it’s not to protect their feelings but to protect the bottom line. They can’t afford the road blocks in people’s minds.
If rudeness spreads, then keeping us all in cubicles and windowless strip-lit offices and encouraging us to eat at our desks and communicate by faceless email is like saying, ‘From now on, we’re all going to work in a disease factory.’ One report I read was virtually pleading with businesses to consider whether they really needed internal emails, so often so easy to misinterpret.