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Amy Alkon writes the award-winning advice column The Advice Goddess. She has been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Psychology Today and has appeared on "Good Morning America," "The Today Show," NPR, CNN, MTV, "Politically Incorrect," and "Nightline." She blogs daily at advicegoddess.com, can be found on Twitter at amyalkon, and lives in California.

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I See Rude People

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Contents

Chapter One

Yes, Barry, it's me, a total stranger, calling you on your cell phone.

"Who are you? Who are you?" Barry asked, again and again. "I don't know you."

"No, you don't, but I know lots of things about you, Barry! Yes, I know lots and lots of personal details about you ... down to your name and phone number, which you shouted into your phone at Starbucks, not caring in the least whether the rest of us wanted to hear all about you or not."

Barry was speechless—for a change.

"Just calling to let you know, Barry, that if you'd like your private life to remain private, you might want to be a little more considerate next time! Bye!"

Just because you have a self doesn't mean you should express it. I know, I know ... as the Barrys of the world, commandeering the airspace of every coffee shop, grocery store aisle, and post office line inform me, "IT'S A FREE COUNTRY!" "IT'S NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS!" And then, there's my favorite: "IT'S A PUBLIC PLACE!" Yes, Barry, it is, which means you share it with a lot of other people—people who'd rather not have their thoughts bullhorned away by the revelation that you're in Starbucks, you'll be home at six, and you have genital warts.

We're all sick of this, yet it's the rare person who squeaks out a word of protest to the perps. If anything, when I shush a cell phone bellower or ask them to pipe down, some other restaurant or café patron being forced to listen to them will come to their abuser's defense, snapping at me, "If you don't like it, go to the library!" (Uh, I wasn't aware the librarians had started serving breakfast—and besides, the library is no place to escape all the asshats yakking it up on their cells.)

What gives? Did somebody put something in all the latte foam that gave the entire nation Stockholm syndrome, where the hostage goes all cuddly on their kidnapper? It seems so simple to me: We need to tell these thought-snatchers that our attention doesn't belong to them, that their right to have loud, dull cell phone conversations ends where our ears begin.

When I ask the brave defenders of others' noise pollution if they're actually enjoying it, nobody ever stands up, pounds their chest, and says, "I live to hear some lady take over the psychiatrist's waiting room with the story of her car trouble!"

Picture a woman, early 50s, voice all broken glass and gravel, shouting into her phone and out to a captive audience of patients, patients' friends and families, all of them reading magazines and talking in low tones to one another. And lucky you, you only have to picture this. I was one of 15 or so hostages forced to listen to the woman power-babbling into her phone for 20 minutes straight:

Shut up and listen! Cars have four motor mounts, not five. So, I should go over to Eddie's and have him drive the car around the block. And I'm at Dr. Jaffe's and maybe I'll come over when I'm done.... I won't throw a fit! I won't throw a fit! ... Just give me five minutes. Can you do that? Can you do that? ... That's fine ... that's reasonable. Okay ... alright.

Okay ... alright ... so that was one situation where I kept my big red trap shut. Since the woman was waiting to see a shrink, I figured there was a chance she was not only madder than a bag of ferrets, but violent, too. I likewise make it my business to just suck it up whenever somebody barking into a cell phone is wearing one of those gangland shower caps or looks like they might be armed. But, what's weird to me is how many people always suffer in silence, even if it's just a 13-year-old mall brat "like, yeah, ya know"-ing so loud in line behind them that it's impossible to hear the counter guy trying to take their lunch order.

If it isn't fear of bodily injury that keeps people from speaking up, it's probably fear of verbal confrontation, or maybe they're just not that practiced at it. I'm a syndicated advice columnist with somewhat controversial views, so I regularly get mail from readers that opens with something like "Dear Bitch." (If you're going to refer to me as "Bitch," maybe drop the "Dear"?) I guess it's a little easier for me to take the heat after telling somebody, usually in somewhat politer terms, to put a muzzle on it.

Just Call Me Revengerella

Perhaps you're picturing me as a little redheaded girl marching around telling the grownups where to put their teaspoons. It really wasn't that way. In fact, I'm no more educated in that sort of etiquette than the average person, and for most of my life, I didn't pay much attention to rudeness. And then, one day, I can't pinpoint exactly when, I just couldn't take it anymore. Overnight, I was like that "I see dead people" kid, except it was "I see rude people." They were everywhere. And they weren't just on cell phones. Cell phone rudeness is just the most prevalent form of modern mannerlessness, or what I call "the new rudeness"—people wildly indifferent to other people. Like Peter Parker, bitten by a radioactive spider and turned into Spiderman, I was transformed: Amy Alkon, nice Midwestern girl, became Amy Alkon, manners psycho, the illegitimate child of Miss Manners and Johnny "Jackass" Knoxville. And, not long afterward, at a Venice, California, Starbucks, a boor named Barry started taking his calls outside.

Barry's just one tiny link in the great, rude chain of being. There's a meanness, a hostile self-centeredness, that's overtaken our society since around the turn of the millennium, and nobody's safe from all the pushing, shoving, and shouting. Contrast the age-old notion of respect for the elderly with "Outta my way, Gramps!"—the message shoppers at a Los Angeles Trader Joe's supermarket sent as they nearly flattened a frail little old man in a walker in their rush to get to the organic veggies.

Now, maybe you're feeling a wave of smug rising in you, those of you who don't live in New York or Los Angeles, suspecting this new rudeness is just one of those big bad coastal city things. Sorry, but when I travel in America, even when I go back to the Midwest, I experience it: "The land of the free" is now the land of the free to be rude, and what used to be called "common courtesy" is getting to be about as common as suburban sightings of the spotted owl.

Assholes Go Back Farther Than Aristotle

Yeah, yeah, yeah ... once again, somebody's sounding the alarm that civilization's going down the tubes. So, what else is new? Humans probably developed speech largely so they could tell each other to shut the hell up already. And probably since early humans grunted their first words, somebody's been shrieking that the world's about to end, and more often than not, blaming that perennial menace, The Teenager:

I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words ... exceedingly (disrespectful) and impatient of restraint.

— Hesiod, 700 B.C.

There's more to recent rudeness than some 21st century version of kids street-racing their chariots through the middle of town, listening to death-lute, and tossing their ouzo bottles into some nobleman's yard. Just like teens throughout time, basically doing their thing without a whole lot of thought for anybody else's thing,...