Angry Traveler: Use SIR, with love
“If your brat doesn’t stop kicking my seat, I’m gonna deck him and you.”
“Get your lousy hands off my seat back, you moron.”
“Will you shut your trap? I want to sleep, and I don’t need to spend time making so-called conversation with someone who obviously didn’t get past the third grade.”
I’ve never actually said these things. I’ve been tempted, though. I bet anybody who travels, especially by air, has been.
Maybe it’s because we’ve never “rude proofed” ourselves.
That’s the premise of a great new book by P.M. Forni, founder of the Civility Initiative at Johns Hopkins University. Forni is a professor of Italian literature, but his writings on behavior are so world-class that I keep hoping he’ll leave Alighieri and Eco to others.
He has followed up “Choosing Civility” with “The Civility Solution: What to Do When People Are Rude,” an engaging tome that begins with “Eight Rules for a Civil Life.”
As with “any kind of medical situation, it’s better to prevent the situation than to try to cure it,” he said in an interview this week. “That’s why I spent a considerable amount of pages [explaining how] you can be that kind of person people are less likely to be rude to.”
Three of his eight rules are especially important for travelers:
Disagree graciously and refrain from arguing.
Get to know the people around you.
Ask, don’t tell.
After you absorb these lessons, Forni offers situations and solutions. Chapter 8 focuses on travel, on the road, in the air and on the train. Of air travel he writes: “Being treated like freight … remains one of the most humbling and disquieting experiences.”
Say “Amen” someone.
So when confronted with the situations mentioned at the opening of this piece (kid kicking seat, moron grabbing seat back, seat mate who won’t shut up), he suggests behaviors that incorporate SIR: Stating, Informing and Requesting. “This is a formula that combines courtesy and assertiveness,” he told me. For instance, let’s say you’re addressing the kicking kid. Here’s what he suggests:
“Excuse me, you may not be aware that your child is kicking the back of my seat. Would you make sure that she doesn’t? I really would like to relax.”
I’m pretty sure that would have worked better than what I saw some years ago on a New York-Los Angeles air trip in which the aggrieved kickee and the mother of the kicker got into a fist fight that had flight attendants restraining both parties.
As Forni notes, the danger of incivility, beyond the individual upset, is violence. And with the stress-o-meter running full tilt in air travel today — and we can broaden that to life in general, wouldn’t you say? — it can be his way and the highway. In the end, travel does not have to equal travail any more than life is necessarily a constant series of kerfuffles.
– Catharine Hamm, Los Angeles Times Travel Editor
2 Comments on “Angry Traveler: Use SIR, with love”
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June 28th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
“Excuse me, you may not be aware that your child is kicking the back of my seat. Would you make sure that she doesn’t? I really would like to relax.”
And then they take out a gun and kill you.
Forget it. I’m just going to move seats. Or tell someone in charge and they can take the bullet for me.
June 29th, 2008 at 8:21 am
Hmmmm…how do I say this, the professor’s solutions are so “academic”. They won’t pass the reality test.
The best way is to move unless you have nothing to lose and want to confront the kicker.
On one of my recent flights, a middle age South Asian or Middle Eastern looking couple sat next to me. The female, resting her head on her husband’s lap, took off her shoes and lay down on the 2 empty seats with her stinking feet facing me! She’s very selfish with no consideration for a fellow passenger, me. I told a flight attendant and the flight attendant did nothing.
When I boarded the plane on another Trans-Pacific flight, a Vietnamese guy was in my seat. I showed him my boarding pass and he pointed a seat behind him and told me to sit there. I said he has no authority to tell me what to do. He went off and shouted obscene language at me! Guess what, the flight attendant moved me to another seat far away from him. Unbelievable! Why didn’t the flight attendant kick the Vietnamese guy off the plane?