DEAR MISS MANNERS: My spouse and I had an incredible and intimate honeymoon within the Leeward Islands.
Within the spirit of the event, we booked first-class tickets for our flights.
Throughout boarding for the return leg, the flight attendant requested if we want something to drink. We requested champagne to commemorate an ideal week spent collectively. The attendant acknowledged that they solely had sufficient champagne for us every to order a glass, and that there wouldn’t be any extra for the flight.
We took this to imply that every passenger on this flight might solely order champagne as soon as, so our reply to the flight attendant was, “That’s fine, we’ll take it now, thank you!”
Nonetheless, after she served us the champagne, the couple behind us requested her for some — to which the flight attendant replied that we had completed the champagne for the complete flight!
Within the second, we had misunderstood her, however it obtained me pondering: If we’d recognized nobody else would get champagne however us, wouldn’t it have been poor manners to take the final of it? Actually that’s the case in a social setting, however is it nonetheless the case on a industrial flight?
GENTLE READER: The rule you discuss with is a social rule, as distinct from a enterprise rule. And a meal at a restaurant — and, by extension, a meal on an airplane, even in first-class — is a industrial transaction.
You’d, due to this fact, defer to a different couple you had been touring with, however to not the folks just a few rows again, whom you have got by no means met.
In your case, you probably did no mistaken — though it appears price mentioning that the flight attendant blaming you for the dearth of champagne was hardly first-class remedy.
And whereas Miss Manners realizes you had been most likely borrowing adjectives from the resort’s brochure while you described your honeymoon as “amazing” and “intimate,” she thinks that subsequent time, you would possibly simply go away it at “amazing.”
DEAR MISS MANNERS: Are the foundations about discussing faith in social settings considerably relaxed when somebody volunteers that they (or their household) are clergy?
For example, I’d by no means ask somebody I simply met about their denomination, or the place they attend non secular companies. However most innocuous follow-up questions on a clergy member’s calling would reveal that info, even when not directly.
I clearly don’t need to begin non secular debates in social settings, however I additionally wouldn’t need somebody to really feel like they made a dialog awkward once they solely acknowledged the identical details about themselves as everybody else had.
GENTLE READER: You might be presupposing that everybody has lengthy since forgotten the foundations towards discussing one’s occupation in social settings. Perhaps.
Miss Manners agrees that it could be unkind to deal with clergy as pariahs in dialog as quickly as they point out what they do. And she’s going to overlook the rule about discussing professions within the second — if we are able to a minimum of agree to not examine salaries whereas doing so.
Please ship your inquiries to Miss Manners at her web site, www.missmanners.com; to her e-mail, gentlereader@missmanners.com; or by postal mail to Miss Manners, Andrews McMeel Syndication, 1130 Walnut St., Kansas Metropolis, MO 64106.
