DEAR MISS MANNERS: On our neighborhood app, one in every of my neighbors cautioned that two younger males had lately knocked on her door. She may see them on the safety digital camera and she or he didn’t know them. She thought them odd, however opened the door anyway.
Nothing unhealthy occurred, however she felt unsettled and introduced the interplay to our neighborhood’s consideration.
I commented that it was high-quality to disregard knocking and to not open your door to strangers, including that it’s not even rude. One other neighbor disagreed and stated it was rude. Please settle the query.
GENTLE READER: Security — and legality — transcend etiquette’s social obligations. You do not want to be welcoming to somebody who’s robbing your own home.
The truth that your neighbor was unsettled is sufficient proof to affirm that she mustn’t have opened the door. Trespassers of any sort needn’t be handled as friends, Miss Manners assures you. Even the police could not enter with no warrant.
DEAR MISS MANNERS: I’ve a lot of meals allergy symptoms. I can handle them when eating at house, and even in some eating places, the place I can select what I can deal with and request “leave-outs.” However eating at different individuals’s houses is a problem.
If a bunch/hostess broadcasts their menu forward of time, and I can inform there’s nothing I can eat, what do I do? Go, however take small parts and faux to eat, presumably asking a neighboring diner to eat what I can’t? Not go in any respect, although I’d wish to see them? Or inform them I’d love to come back, however might want to deliver my very own fare, as scrumptious as theirs sounds?
Please assist. I’m discombobulated.
GENTLE READER: Allergy symptoms (not mere preferences) are reliable issues to say to a dinner host, even when unsolicited. The inconvenience of rearranging a menu, Miss Manners assures you, continues to be lower than that of getting to resuscitate a visitor.
DEAR MISS MANNERS: Whereas touring overseas on a gaggle tour, I invited three journey companions to share a bottle of wine with me, and so they agreed. None of us have been teetotalers.
Because the waiter poured for us, one woman refused the wine and ordered a soda. Was I obligated to pay for the soda? I did, but when she had selected a cocktail as an alternative of the wine, what would my obligation have been?
GENTLE READER: Obligation is a robust phrase, however it was an affordable presumption that you just have been treating your companions to a spherical of drinks, not simply that one explicit bottle of wine. That your buddy deviated from the plan is much less of an assault on protocol than you make it out to be.
Paying the nominal price for her soda — which she might need ordered for any variety of causes: a pending work name, say, or a propensity to complications from that sort of wine — was the gracious factor to do. Getting her a cocktail, if she most popular, would have likewise been sort, though the added expense might need prompted her to supply to pay.
In both case, actual or imagined, Miss Manners thinks the price of accommodating your buddy’s modified thoughts may hardly be larger than that of wounding the friendship and sustaining a grudge.
And she or he trusts that they’ll deal with you for the following spherical.
