Etiquette Maven Meets Missed Manners
I might not have paid that much attention to Kimberly Matthews’ letter if she hadn’t sounded a theme I’ve heard a lot about lately: namely, that people have rotten manners.
* We’ve read about the boorish behavior and foul language of some council members in local city governments.
* A friend says his biggest gripe during an unemployed period was that potential employers wouldn’t return his phone calls, even if it was just to say they weren’t interested.
* A stranger who drove up in front of me used my gate-entry card to get into my residential complex. She then broke the card in half while inserting it in the slot and, instead of apologizing, told me the card must have been cracked before.
So when Matthews’ letter came, complaining about the lack of etiquette in Orange County business, I knew she was onto something.
Matthews, 32, started a solo operation in 1984 that she calls First Impressions, an Irvine enterprise that offers etiquette and “image enhancement” advice to individuals or companies. For example, someone might come to her and say they consider themselves upwardly mobile in a company but needs to polish their social skills. Or a company executive will tell her they’ve targeted an employee for promotion but that the person needs refinement in social settings.
It’s in the course of doing business--especially in the search for new clients--Matthews says, that she runs into an appalling lack of common courtesy.
She told of one series of correspondence with the voice mail machine of a major company. The initial messages told of the seminar and package program she offers. She got no response.
“After the fourth phone call, I said on the voice mail that even if he was not interested in my package, could he please give me the courtesy of calling back. By the seventh call, I put a message on his voice mail that I hoped he was not the example for his employees, and that if he was, then he definitely needed my services.”
The executive never called back, but he wrote a letter indicating he wasn’t interested, Matthews said.
Although my credentials as a man of uncommon courtesy are rock-solid, I tried to play the devil’s advocate.
Obviously he wasn’t interested in your offer, I said. Maybe he was busy and figured you would interpret his non-response to your unsolicited offer as a “no.”
“My feeling is that we’re all real busy,” Matthews said. “I’m extremely busy, everyone’s real busy, but (just) to make a phone call. . . . It just comes back to courtesy. It’s very poor manners. It’s poor business policy.”
Sadly, she said, she sees things getting worse as businesses get increasingly automated. “I think what’s happened is that we’ve become such a me-me world. Business is harder to obtain and people are busier. They need to weed out what they want and don’t want. In doing so, they just choose to ignore it (a call they don’t want to return). We’re losing that face-to-face communication that we have with other human beings. We’re losing touch. Our generation is losing touch. What’s going to happen to our kids’ ” generation?
Being polite and socially correct has been a passion of Matthews’ since she was a young girl who eventually entered a host of beauty pageants. She decided then she wanted as an adult to start a business where children could get “charm school” lessons at affordable prices.
At 23, she set up a program like that through a modeling agency but had trouble making much money at it. What she noticed, however, was that lots of parents told her they knew co-workers and supervisors who could use her training.
At its most fundamental level, she offers people advice on the most flattering clothing for them, the proper way to enter a room in a formal setting, table manners and their general carriage.
But those lessons tap into a deeper need, she said.
“My real frustration is that this is something people want to know, but it’s kind of behind closed doors. They’re hungry for this kind of information, but they’re too embarrassed to say so. They’ve got a fancy car, nice clothes, so they say that’s going to make them look like they’re successful, but when they open their mouth or go out in society, a lot of people really feel uncomfortable.”
Although she doesn’t limit her definition of “etiquette” to eating, Matthews said the table habits of some people are “horrendous. There are a lot of adults who don’t know what to do,” she said.
I’m probably making Matthews sound like a party pooper, which isn’t at all the way she comes across. But while most of us have given up on hoping for civility in the masses, she hasn’t.
“It’s amazing how people have really lost the basic fundamentals of manners,” she said. “How many times do you say thank you in a day? Do you say please ? We’re so caught up in what we’re doing, focusing on ourselves, we forget to consider we wouldn’t be where we are without people’s help.”
Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.
