Читать книгу Blaikie’s Guide to Modern Manners - Thomas Blaikie - Страница 8

‘Why don’t people know how to use a cashpoint machine?’ Zoe asks. In the queue she becomes impatient. But she is not quite herself near a cash dispenser anyway – so many anxieties about lack of funds. She’d rather snatch the smallest sum she thinks she can get away with and run. Which is why, in the supermarket, she is often holding up the queue paying £6.78 on her debit card and annoying people like Matt, always in a hurry because of family commitments. If you probe deeper into Matt’s soul, you’ll find that he does sometimes wonder why so many people stand for twenty minutes in a queue at the checkout and still haven’t got their money ready.

 Try to achieve technical mastery of the cashpoint machine. If there is a queue, don’t go on and on trying to make it give you money when you know quite well your account is empty. If you have a complicated transaction, apologise to anybody you are keeping waiting.

 Perhaps one day, in supermarkets, there will be a queue for people who have got their money or their cards ready.

 To speed things up, hand over your card as soon as all your goods have been scanned. Don’t wait until you have finished packing them.

 Don’t keep everybody waiting while you spend hours devising some gargantuan Dewey decimal system for packing your purchases.