KEY POINTS:
You can tell a lot about people from their manners. I don't mean mysteriously and meaninglessly verboten table manners, such as tipping your soup plate away from you and not tipping your dessert plate at all (no logic in that), or frowning upon someone who holds their knife like a pencil.
At boarding school I was sent to the "pig's table" - solitary confinement in the dining room - for lesser sins than these. Asking someone to pass the butter, instead of waiting for that person to ask you if you would like the butter passed to you, was a federal crime at Chilton St James. Hopefully schools for young ladies are more tolerant these days.
I'm talking about everyday courtesies, for example the way passengers treat flight attendants, motorists treat road works gangs - especially those poor guys and gals holding stop/go lollipop signs to reduce traffic to one lane - and in particular how diners treat the waiting staff.
I managed to write two 5000-word feature articles on the latter when I worked in and later ran restaurants in Russell. There are good customers but unfortunately you forget them when they've gone out the door. It's the rude boors whose names and faces stay with you forever.
I thought of this last week when I saw a photo of pinched-faced Rod Petricevic standing in the dock facing criminal charges over the collapse of the company he founded and grew very rich from, Bridgecorp Management Services. Petricevic has flown too close to the sun and fallen to Earth before - in the late-1980s after the stockmarket crash.
Before that, he used to frequent my restaurant, The Gables, along with his mates and their women, drinking the best wines, being rude to the wait staff, and generally acting as if the world owed them a living.
I've written about one particular incident before, but as it was published in 1990 I'm figuring that after 18 years it's timely to remind people why manners matter.
Petricevic and his wife, in a group, sat at the best tables ordering the waitress around without so much as a please or thank you. When another in the group couldn't have what she ordered (there was a whitebait shortage) she tossed her menu at the waitress. I decided it was time to intervene, gave them an account for what they'd consumed and asked them to leave. There was much protestation and threats of buying the freehold and cancelling my lease, but the wait staff - and other diners who applauded their departure - were well rid of them.
So even if I was of a mind to invest in high-risk ventures such as Bridgecorp, I'd eschew any corporate linked to his name simply because of his attitude to those he views as belonging at the bottom of the food chain. He may well have improved his manners, but it seems his business acumen still leaves a lot to be desired.
Is it too much to expect common courtesy? Are people so time poor (to use that dreadful expression) they don't have a spare minute to smile, or treat others with respect?
In part, I blame technology. How can someone be sociable when they walk down the street, buy items from shops, or buy a bus ticket, without removing their earphones? If you really want to see bad manners, spend a few hours in the Koru lounge. Passengers shouting into their cellphones so we all hear their inane conversations, fatties waddling up to the food bar refuelling their plates with food they don't need just because it's "free", bags plonked on seats when there's obviously a shortage of room.
And don't get me started on plane etiquette - men who hog the armrest, women with huge bags in the overhead lockers.
In my experience it's the well-off, in general, who have the most disgusting behaviour. The rich are different not just because they have more money but because many of them have less grace.
Warren Buffet, the world's richest man, could well be an exception. He's known to eschew due diligence when considering buying a company, preferring to meet the owners and making his decision based on their personal behaviour. deb.coddington@xtra.co.nz
