Miss(ing) Manners

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An apocryphal story about camping in the bush goes as follows: Only the female mosquito bites. And she does so without a sound, a silent bearer of misery from above, malaria, dengue fever or at least a lot of itchy red bumps. (The smaller male buzzes in your ear but is harmless.)

The myth serves up an insight into the modern business world in Los Angeles. When you hear a lot of annoying buzzing, things are OK. When you hear absolutely nothing, be afraid. Be very afraid.

I refer specifically to the current practice of going mute when the answer is “No.” Like Bartleby, the dead-letter clerk, more and more business people prefer not to answer at all when certain questions are posed. This applies to a job candidacy, and, of course, a story idea you’ve pitched to a producer, publisher or editor.

Silence as de facto refusal would appear to be the next big thing in millennial messaging – get offa my lawn, you kids! – except that everybody’s doing it. If the perps were exclusively crusty-nosed want-repreneurs tweaking those Google rankings, OK then, I’m simply too long in the tooth to hold their sketchy attentions. But using impersonal silence en lieu of actual, proactive business communication may now be observed in every camp, including reptilian Botox abusers and old farts with framed diplomas and comb-overs – people born before 1980. People who should just know better.

For example: Late last year, I was scouted by a headhunter for a plum creative position working for a cosmetics brand, a position dead center in my expertise. I wore my lucky socks. I killed. I knew it. The three young women who conducted the panel interview concurred. Sweetly, they also asked me to complete an online test, which I did gladly. That was in November. I’ve since emailed back to restate my interest, twice. Nada since then.

Self-important, cowardly, and just plain rude. It’s a little like the former boyfriend who won’t answer his phone when your number pops up in his caller ID once the bloom is off the relationship rose. All you can do is bawl into an insensate scrap of plastic, “But, but, but, Hambone, you said I was special!” It is the nadir of remote humiliation.

Proper business etiquette commands that all communication be conducted in a definitive, professional and courteous manner. At the heart of the matter here: grace and skill required to articulate and deliver unpleasant tidings with aplomb. It’s a piece of cake to tell someone that they got the job (gold star!). Telling the same qualified someone that the job went instead to the ditzy CEO’s 22-year old niece – the one with the li’l doggie in her bedazzled backpack! – is rather more difficult (sad face).

Fellas, this ain’t my first time at the rejection rodeo. Don’t pity me. To begin with, I am a professional writer who earned my chops back in the day when New York and, gee whiz, even some other cities in America published lots of newspapers, magazines and books. I wrote for many of them. I knew that I had in some sense arrived when I could literally no longer jam shut the metal desk-drawer crammed with rejection notes from editors. In those days, they were typed on creamy company letterhead, and sent to your mailbox in an actual envelope with a stamp.

And with some Salieri-like kink of masochism, I hoarded and cherished every one. I accumulated enough to paper the walls of my office. Before I began my decadelong run as a monthly columnist for Cosmopolitan magazine (writing and answering faux reader questions, no less), I received a couple of personal rejection letters, versus prefab forms, from the desk of that original mouse-burger herself, Helen Gurley Brown. Her tone was deliriously breezy, and she was the first person on Earth to call me “VT” in writing. Today, anyone who knows me does the same.

I generally resist the common wisdom that the digital lexicon has ruined literacy. But perhaps what it has ruined is the expectation of what once were called basic manners. And, yes, I realize that “common” courtesy has never in fact been common. I am reminded of this every time a rat-tailed, entitled grandpa elbows in front of me in line at Whole Foods with a death grip on his gluten-free babka.

But this latest aberration is more passive-aggressive than merely inept. Is it in fact our new reliance upon acronyms, emoticons and codes that now makes a nonresponse an acceptable part of business correspondence, as a gutless sub for a civilized “no thank-you”? A curt, straight-up rejection is preferable any day to the sounds of cyberwinds whispering over the barren nothingness of the new cultural barbarism.

And anticipating that no news is in fact bad news these days, I’m keeping a rolled-up newspaper – a back issue of the Business Journal will do – at the ready. In case I hear nothing.

Victoria Thomas is a freelance writer. She lives in Pasadena.

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