Thank you, come again.

Warning and disclaimer: This post is likely to end up as some sort of angry rant. I've been meaning to mention this for a while now, so it may become messier than I would like. Caveat lector.

Anyway, the subject currently on my mind is something that ought to be, and was, in the distant days of my youth, a trivial act of common courtesy. I normally hold open doors for other people.

I used not to think more of it. I would hold a door open, the person for whom I held it would look at me, say, or even mouth, a brief 'thank you', then pass through the door.

Three actions, so, of course, there are three basic ways that this can go wrong:

It occasionally happens that the other chap (or chap-ess, but even more rarely) also wants to be polite, so they pause, either to offer to let me go first, or to make sure that I am holding the door for them. This momentary delay is elegantly and wordlessly polite. So much so, in fcat, that it hardly counts as going wrong.

Secondly, the other person may hold my gaze briefly, and then not say 'thank you'. I find this sort of behaviour unintelligible and quintessentially inhumane. To look into another human's eyes is to form some sort of brief connection with them, at the very least to acknowledge that they are, in fact, also human and real. So I genuinely fail to understand how person A can acknowledge person B, holding a door for person A, and not still fail to say thank you. Years ago, this used to annoy me so much that I made it a habit to say 'You're welcome' whenever this happened. Unfortunately, whenever I met someone who actually thanked me, the sheer shock induced me to blurt out something like 'You're more than welcome', which was normally too strange to pass unnoticed. For this reason, and the fact that it is needlessly rude in itself, I broke that habit.

Thirdly, there are those who fail to make eye contact, instead choosing to barge through the door without giving any of acknowledgment. These people rude, but in a more understandable way than the second sort; merely isolated, by habit, choice, or conditioning, from social interaction with those whom they do not know. Ad this is fine - understandable and even forgivable - especially in cities and busy people. (Sorry for the zeugma.)

This list is complete, but to use a mathematical analogy (a mathaphor), it is complete and also bounded. Outside of the thought process required to create that list, which I probably first picked up ten years ago, lies a more important question. Ad if, to my embarrassment, it never occurred to me to ask it, I would claim in my defence that the domain of thought which led to the list above is, mathaphorically, complete.

The really important question is: 'Why on Earth should I expect anyone to say 'thank you'? Unless they asked e to open the door, or they couldn't easily do so for themselves, why should they care whether or not I saved them an insignificant amount of effort? The only answer is that it corresponds to a social or cultural norm with which I am familiar ad happy, but by what right can I foist it on anyone else?

I do claim to be beyond that stage of boy-scout-gone-wrong pettiness during which I would feel virtuous for having 'better' manners than the other person in the sketch. And yet I have to admit that, in the final analysis, I hold open doors for others for reasons which are entirely my own.