Q. I am now working from home and am therefore in situ when my Korean cleaners arrive each week. What is the correct way to behave in this situation? Although their English is limited, they are clearly intelligent; both their children have won scholarships to excellent schools. I fear that my current mode — making them cups of tea — is getting on their nerves.
M.S., Rozelle, NSW, Australia
A.You are disconcerting these cleaners by acting in a way that their cultural background will not have prepared them for. Whereas in the West the polite fiction is ‘we are all good friends’, in the East the polite fiction is ‘I have respect for you — particularly if I am being paid to work for you’. The fact that you make tea for these cleaners does not fit into this framework. From now on you should limit your social contact with them to enquiring how their children are progressing, before you retire to your desk to allow them to tackle unmolested the work for which they are being paid.
Q. People who shoot tend to fall into two categories when it comes to wearing their woolly shooting socks, but which is the correct style of dress? Some guns wear their plus-fours tucked into the top of their socks, secured by a tongue of highly coloured garter, while others wear their plus-fours over the top of their socks thereby ensuring that if it rains the water doesn’t run down the inside of the socks. What is the right sock etiquette, lest I be mistaken for a corporate gun?
N.C., Whitchurch, Hants
A. The correct procedure is to put on your socks and do up your garters first. (Beware of brightly coloured garters which are beginning to look corporate — unless you are a scoutmaster.) Then you must put your plus-fours on and fasten them properly beneath your knees. The design will ensure there is no problem with rain. To do otherwise may give the impression that you do not actually have plus-fours but are trying to pass off ordinary trousers, hacked off at the knee, as the correct kit.
Q. I notice these days that when I offer to strip my bed after staying with people they often say either ‘Oh leave it, you’re perfectly clean’ or ‘Oh no, we’ve just got young coming next’. Is it not essential always to provide clean sheets for one’s guests? And, if it’s not, which guests need them and which don’t?
Name and address withheld
A. One school of thought deems it quite acceptable — sometimes on spurious ecological grounds — to give children and teenaged boys clean pillowcases and to leave openly on the bed the pre-used, although never ‘pre-soiled’, sheets of the previous guest. Sometimes an old trick is employed as these younger guests mount the staircase. ‘I haven’t got round to changing your bed since —— stayed for a night,’ says the hostess, naming someone inoffensive. ‘But I’ve left the clean linen on the bed and I’ll come up and help you remake it in a moment or two.’ Nine times out of ten, on coming up, she finds the youths already installed in the existing sheets, having been too lazy or drunk to bother changing them. This behaviour is unacceptable. Giving your guests the sensual thrill of slipping into a cool, crisp, pristine envelope is part of hospitality. To be favoured in this way will boost the self-esteem of even the most beast-like youth.
Comments