According to recent polling, over 70 percent of those questioned said people are ruder today than they were years ago.  Well, there just may be a kernel (or two) of truth to that. 

One recent Friday evening, around 5:30, standing on the corner of 53rd Street and Park Avenue in the rain, sixteen cabs passed me by (I actually counted) before I managed to get one to stop by flashing a wad of bills.  Years ago, I doubt whether it would have been more than eight or nine.  Eleven, tops.  And back then, rather than pretend they didn’t see me, the way these guys did, the old-time cab drivers would have been courteous enough to acknowledge my presence by switching to their “Off Duty” sign as they splashed by. 

That same night, at one of New York’s finer restaurants (I won’t mention the name for fear they’d make my next experience even worse), the maitre d’ had my wife and me wait at the bar for almost forty-five minutes past our reservation time, and then, to add insult to injury, gave us a table right outside the kitchen.  Several years ago, I’m sure he would have been considerate enough to at least give us a table next to the wait station.

Saturday morning, I picked up a suit at the cleaners and noticed that a stain was still there (though, admittedly, it was somewhat fainter).  When I brought this to the proprietor’s attention, he acted annoyed, rubbed the material a bit, then shook his head and said the problem was the quality of the fabric.  In the not too distant past, he certainly would have had at least the decency to tell me he would dry-clean it again, then done nothing, and when I came back said, “See, I told you it was the fabric.”

That afternoon, the super of our building, after six months of my badgering him, came up to fix a leak in the toilet.  He entered the bathroom, studied the leak for a few minutes, made a face and sighed, then informed us he had to go downstairs to get some tools. When he didn’t return and I called him, he acted annoyed and informed me that it was Saturday evening and he needed some special equipment from a store that wouldn’t be open till Monday.  I can still remember the days when he would have been thoughtful enough to gruffly provide us with that lame, bullshit excuse before he left my apartment.  

The next morning, on my way back from getting the Sunday newspaper, I hurried to the elevator in my building’s lobby and watched the doors close as the lone passenger looked at me and made no attempt whatsoever to hit the “door open” button.  It wasn’t so long ago that an elevator passenger in the same situation would have definitely feigned going for that button before allowing the doors to close on me.

My wife called the telephone company that same day to try and settle a rather large error on our bill:  a two-hundred-and-twenty dollar call to Kuala Lumpur.  She told the agent how ridiculous this was, since we don’t know anyone in Kuala Lumpur.  Hell, she said, we barely know anyone outside of New York.  The agent replied that we should try to improve our social skills.  My wife told her she didn’t think that was funny and that if she can’t resolve the Kuala Lumpur charge, to please transfer the call to a supervisor.  Laughing, the agent said to my wife, “Transfer you to a supervisor?  What do you think this is, the nineties?”