Cafe confessions: Do they think we can't hear?
Bellower at Table 1 gasses about his $13 million deal; mom in window seat whinges about overweight daughter; everyone else is rapt.
from the July 20, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 3
Adviser, quietly at first: She's a gabber either way. Gabber in the old world and gabber in the new. Gabbers get hurt. But she's also the only one who's been able to show any improvement in the bottom line in her department.
Adviser: So send her to China.Owner: ....We've already said that's the direction we might go in.Adviser: ....If you want to fire her, OK. Or there's China.... Then you get her out from underneath your hair in the business, which will make everybody happy.I wonder, as I listen to the litany of complaints about a woman who may, by the end of my Frappucino, be destined for Beijing, whether it's even legal to talk about that sort of thing in public. But more than that, I think, isn't it just – wrong?
"It seems to me the wrong is done to you, by bothering you," says Anna Post, of the Emily Post Institute, named after the alpha-woman of modern American etiquette and Anna Post's great-great-grandmother. "You're thinking about it, and it sounds like you don't like hearing that conversation. Making other people around you uncomfortable is not good etiquette."
The only other rule, it seems, is calculating risk. Never say anything in public you wouldn't want pinned on a bulletin board, Ms. Post advises. Business is a little more complicated: Unless you own the business, you shouldn't talk about it anywhere. Other than that, chatter on.
Sure, George Washington might be aghast to hear the things we now say around on another, but at some level the rules of civility are little more than a reflection of the times they attempt to constrain. And by those standards, according to Boston University political scientist James Schmidt, we're not doing badly.
"I'm a skeptic about the decline in civility. That society was full, first of all, of people routinely spitting, which we don't do anymore," says Professor Schmidt. "They smelled bad. They were drunk in public a lot more often. They were probably beating their children and wives to a greater extent than we do now."
Besides, he points out, inappropriate chatter is the point of cafes. The first coffee shops in England cropped up in the 17th century, in the wake of war and tumultuous royal politics, as a place where ordinary people could discuss politics – a topic none but the elite dared touch before. Public opinion was literally born out of conversations that everyone was shocked to hear in the open air.
***
What you'd have overheard – if not for a short woman shouting, in Russian, into her cellphone – at Peet's Coffee in Newton, Mass. when I interviewed Schmidt: So you're sitting in coffee shops for hours on end listening to people; you're going to print what they say and you're not telling them?
Maybe the coffee-bean grinding and iced-drink blending make people think I can't hear them. Maybe there's some sort of unspoken agreement: I won't protest your sidewalk cellphone conversation if it covers up the gossiping I'm doing. If a secret is shared in public but the decibel level of everyday existence drowns out its telling, maybe it's still a secret.
And if I heard it and pretend, for the sake of everyone, that I didn't, am I a hypocrite? As Miss Manners says, "Hypocrisy is a higher form of human behavior than eavesdropping."
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