simont | Politeness

I don't often get cross when people are rude to me. (At least I don't think I do: statements like that always carry the risk that I might do it and not notice, or not remember.)

My impression is that this is partly because I habitually decouple the things somebody says from the precise words they use to describe them, so that if somebody says something to me in a rude way then I do notice that they said it rudely but often find it easy to dismiss that as irrelevant compared to the actual concept they were trying to communicate; and partly it's also because I don't start from the premise that everybody deserves respect, so if (for example) a random stranger from whom I haven't done anything to earn respect doesn't show me respect then that's not a big deal.

Despite these usually reliable defences, one or two kinds of rudeness definitely get on my nerves. One of them is when people send me software support requests by email, and phrase them in a manner similar to the following:

How do I perform [some task] with your software? I need to do [some more details]. Please provide step by step instructions. Thank you.

The surface trappings of politeness, the ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, are there. But in spite of them, there's an unmistakably peremptory tone to a request phrased like this which makes my blood think seriously about boiling; and what's odd is that I can't quite work out why this gets under my skin in a way that many other kinds of rudeness don't.

It isn't just the fact that the guy wants step-by-step instructions and providing those on demand isn't my job. A quick thought experiment suggests that if he'd merely rephrased the offending sentence as ‘Simple step by step instructions would be best, if you can manage it’, then while I might or might not have had the time or inclination to provide them, I at least wouldn't have been offended by the mere request. So it is definitely something about the way he said it.

One possible cause is that the way he said it implies that he isn't in any doubt that I will do what he asks. The more polite rephrasing of the request which I give above indicates an awareness that I might or might not choose to help him, and hence an awareness that the onus is on him to try to arrange that I want to. To phrase it as he did suggests that he believes there's no need to even try to persuade me.

Another thing that might be a key point is that he only needs step-by-step instructions in the first place because he doesn't really understand what he's trying to do. If he showed any awareness that this lack was a partial cause of the situation (‘I'm afraid I haven't been able to work this out for myself; can you give me some simple instructions, please?’), instead of implying that I'm completely to blame for not having already provided a step-by-step how-to for exactly the thing he wants to do, I think that would have irked me less as well.

But why should either of those, or even both at once, make me so cross? They're only misunderstandings of his position relative to me. And misunderstandings per se shouldn't – and usually don't – offend me: if I can tell that someone's only saying something nasty out of ignorance or confusion then my usual impulse is to try to educate them rather than to become angry. For example, I've occasionally had people send me deliberately offensive email containing lots of four-letter words and insults, and if I know the whole thing is based on a misunderstanding (for example, someone forged a spam in my name and the recipient believed it was really me who sent it) then I find no emotional difficulty in dismissing the whole slew of invective as unimportant and replying politely to explain their mistake.

So I actually can't work out why this particular type of unthinking rudeness makes me so much more annoyed than many kinds of deliberately offensive behaviour, and makes me not merely want to ignore their message but to ignore it as a lesson in manners. It's very odd.

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In the most recent case, it's difficult to tell one way or the other. I'm pretty sure some of them have been native English speakers, though.

(Yes, I've often noticed that many of the least comprehensible support emails I get come from native English speakers, whereas non-native ones tend to take great pains to be clear even if non-idiomatic. There are occasional exceptions – most often from East Asia, where I suspect the local grammar tends to differ rather more fundamentally from English than it does in most European languages – but by and large the people who go out of their way to apologise for their poor English are not the ones who really should be doing so.)

That email sounds like the sort of thing I might send to someone who was absolutely contractually obliged to provide it - say someone to whom I was paying lots of money for a support/service contract.

I'd like to think that even in that situation I'd try to be a little more polite; but yes, phrasing like this would certainly seem less out of place if he and I already knew we had a commitment of some sort to work together to solve his problem.

Hmm. Perhaps the reason this particular misunderstanding grates on me where others don't is that he should be able to figure out that he has no reason to think we have any such pre-existing commitment. Perhaps the difference between this and other more forgivable misunderstandings is that this particular one ought to be trivially resolved by him spending twenty seconds to stop and think, and he hasn't bothered to.

It's preemptory - there's no consideration of why you might want to do what he asks, it's just a set of instructions.

It also has that condescension in it which is used by so many people when communicating with members of the service industry; "your software is complicated, so my problem is YOUR FAULT, and you must fix it".

Having been involved in some arguments recently about politeness on a roleplaying board, I sympathise. I certainly think it's insulting to ask for something in a way that implies giving an order. Personally I try to err on the side of "if it's not too much trouble" when asking for anything, and usually seem to get good results...

There is aways the delete key.

You could always reply with "I only help people who ask me nicely and send me chocolate. It will cost you one cadbury's twirl per instruction."

Then they will either bugger off having dismissed you as barking or enter into the spirit of the thing.

Go on - I dare you. What have you got to lose. At the worst you'll only develop a reputation "Will work for chocolate". And I think I'd be facinated at the response - which you have to post here in the interest of reporting an interesting experiment in social behaviour.

I started this comment as a joke to cheer you up and now I really want you to do it! :-)

I imagine that if I got any chocolate as a result, half of it would contain glutinous biscuit filling, and I'd probably still be unwilling to eat the other half since I'm currently trying to reverse the slight upward trend in my weight. But it's a lovely thought :-)

Well use your imagination - you have the power - you just have to develop an evil genious laugh to go with it.

Blimey, I'd be demanding all sorts of things...

Demand a list of non-trivially gluten-free items available from shops in his locality. It'll raise awareness of the issues, and you may learn something interesting. He gets one step of instructions for each such item listed.

That's brilliant!

The thing that would piss me off about that sort of email is the implication that their time is more important than mine, which I don't think is necessarily a misunderstanding of the text.

It's so bloody rude because the person sending the email assumes you are so unimportant that you sit in a box all day just waiting for him to send you this email so you can leap to your feet like some kind of fucking dog eager to help, because you have no other human relations to deal with today than Mr Fucktard, because [he thinks] his social status is unquestionably higher than yours and saying please and thank you are mere formalities, so the fact that he's said them means you should be even more unceasingly grateful and fawning for his bloody email.

I get people behaving like that to me all day, but more obviously intentionally i.e. to my face in person and to a greater degree. As a single woman with no children, it's practically the whole of my life experience except at work and among goths. It makes me want to shoot them in the face and paint obscenities on their bodies using their splattered brains.

As mentioned, in text form this is conditional on their being a first language English speaker; a non-first-language speaker may just be trying to be as concise as possible so as to risk as few mistakes as possible, while remembering to say please and thank you. Admittedly face to face I've had about as much patronising shit from first as nth-order English language speakers.

The first paragraph of that sounded so unreasonable because I missed the following train of thought:
1) Writing step by step instructions is time consuming and not your job
2) The help files contain step by step instructions anyway
2b) Or you can sometimes just poke things until it does what you want it to
3) They haven't read the help files or poked it because they are SO BUSY and their time is SO IMPORTANT that they didn't bother
4) But they assume yours isn't SO IMPORTANT that you don't have time to WRITE the damn things.

I agree with your analysis, and everyone else's comments (I think Elise was spot on).

You're right, it's difficult to say why *these* implications bother you when others don't. The nearest I can come is suggest that it's superficially plausible, so it sounds like you should be doing this, and although you reject it, that it's said impacts your mental state a bit anyway.

please provide step by step instructions

This is annoying for the same reason that children saying "are we nearly there yet?" is annoying - there is an imbalance in costs; it costs a child almost nothing to ask the question, and costs the driver rather more in the way of distraction (and, indirectly, irritation, although that only exists because of the cost imbalance; so there's a feedback loop).

In this case, I think that the cost to you is both the distraction, and (perhaps) the sense that if you just ignore such distractions, this will generate an (entirely unfair) bad reputation for the software they're wanting your support for. Plus, of course, the same irritation feedback loop as above ...

The general solution to this is to take steps to re-adjust the costs, ideally using a mechanism that's beneficial to either the other person or to the common good or to yourself.

In the former case, I do this by answering by asking a question involving some mental arithmetic ("how long do you think it is since you last asked? what was my answer then?"). I think there are some suggestions above that also take this approach.

It's my observation that, almost universally, the default mechanism that people use to balance the costs of a badly unbalanced interaction if they can't find a better way, is to become angry. This seems to be hard-wired.

Completely unrelated to this post, but - you have mail from me, but it seems to be stuck on the queue on chiark and not getting through to tartarus. I'm getting Exim warnings. AFAICS nothing is getting through to tartarus from chiark just now.

Yeah, tartarus is having mail problems at the moment: apparently a spambot network is giving it a concerted hammering for no obvious reason :-/

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