Callie responded to him/her.

I don't have any creeps, do you know where I can get some?

Waaaant

I think your definition is a little reductive. I read etiquette and manners books for fun, particularly old ones as they are very instructive on the origins and mindset of the people who invented these conventions and just interesting in general. Yes, I'm a hoot at parties.

This is why the disappearance of these language qualifiers from the political sphere is a catastrophe. No one listens to each other because they are all too busy getting offended to hear what the point of the argument is.

To answer your question, no, you were not rude. You gave him the benefit of the doubt by pointing out that the shopping cart was in the way, as though perhaps he had not noticed (even though we all know that he has, and he doesn't care).

I have been fighting this battle for years now, but being nice and being polite are not the same thing. I don't know where this concept came from, that being polite means you must lay yourself out like a mat to be walked on, but it isn't true. For example, in your above recounting of the man on the bus, you were…

I think this is true for the workplace, but social and business manners are vastly different and require different standards. And rightly so, hopefully we don't all go around managing our private lives like a business. Beating around the bush for one's employees isn't impolite, but it is inefficient and difficult to…

I think you are conflating being nice with being polite, which the article does as well, but they aren't the same. Being nice would be "Would you mind doing this work, please? I really need it today, if you don't mind." Being polite would be "Please have this on my desk by today." Being rude would be "Do this now. I…

I beg you not to conflate politeness with niceness. One can be assertive, direct and polite at the same time, even when couching statements in softened language. Too often the modern world believes - erroneously - that to be polite, they must also play nice. And then, left with no armor to defend themselves,…

Right arm?

Oh but those jobs aren't meant to support anyone for a living, you see. If everyone just worked hard enough, no one would have to make coffee, and there is incentive to move up in the world. Because we all know there are so many well-paying jobs hanging as low fruit from the tree of our economy.

Honestly, it's a huge missed opportunity. You have the perfect entrepreneurial bait, a client base who is literally already there all day without you even trying. The owners really couldn't think of a single way to commodify this? I can think of paid senior education/seminar programs and bingo right off the top of my…

They do this? I only remember getting the Moon Man toy no matter who you were. Yikes.

Good lord, that's Tyra? That image doesn't look like Tyra at all.

I'm crossing my fingers that when my husband finishes his PhD, he gets a job in Canada. US family benefits are a joke.

And that's only if your company qualifies. Many places of work are too small and you aren't protected by FMLA.

Yes, pretty much. When I had my daughter, I had just started a new job so I took as much as I felt comfortable taking — two months. I felt lucky to get that much, I have a good job with a union which is becoming more and more rare. I cried every day for a long time because I had to leave her behind before she even…

I know people have different lifestyles, but to my eye it doesn't really bode well that Mr. Cowell is partying it up for weeks on end on the eve of his first child's birth while his girlfriend is ill.

Clearly it was this one, duh.