Читать книгу Blaikie’s Guide to Modern Manners - Thomas Blaikie - Страница 33

Zoe, still rather green in the PR world, got a call the other day from an out-of-town journalist on a trade paper of some kind. He was coming up to London. Could she recommend a restaurant, perhaps one near her office? Her answer was simple: no, she couldn’t. Other times she has had calls asking about hotels or enquiring if it’s possible to ‘buy’ any of the T-shirts her agency were giving away last summer. It was no again to the hotel and as for the T-shirts, they were £15 each. Her managing director, when she got to hear about this, was at first annoyed but eventually rather admiring. ‘Good for you,’ she said.

Zoe hadn’t really got it. These people were looking for freebies. Matt can tell of similar grasping ways. ‘We’ve had suppliers demanding to be taken to particular restaurants, then, when they get there, commandeering the wine list and ordering expensive wine. Sometimes they cancel at the last minute or take calls all the way through lunch.’

It’s not just clients who behave like this. Junior employees, when taken out by their head of department or equivalent for a welcoming lunch, are often astonishingly quick to order. This is because it doesn’t take very long to find the most expensive thing on the menu, that being the only object. Ideally, it should be twice as expensive as anything else. Senior managers are helpless to stop this practice, but they do call perpetrators ‘lobsters’ after the item they’re most likely to choose. Luckily, Zoe behaved well at her lunch with the managing director. She doesn’t like lobster or really even know what it is.

Customers are at it too. ‘You’ve miscalculated my phone bill by 12p. I want twenty minutes of free calls and a sequined draught excluder.’ Or, in the supermarket, ‘My trolley’s wonky. I want a year’s supply of frozen peas.’ They call it compensation but actually it’s something for nothing.

 Stand up to vulgar grasping clients and customers. They know they’re just trying it on. They won’t dare to protest if you refuse to give in to their outrageous demands. They’ll crawl away, utterly crushed.

 Don’t be a lobster.