It was one of those moments when you wonder, just for a split second, whether you've become invisible. Faced with one of those big, heavy doors that are terribly trendy among the department-store and restaurant fraternity, I stood back and held it open for a couple coming the other way, rather than end up in an intimate mid-doorway clinch. Minutes later, I was still standing there, door in hand, as a steady stream of people poured through the door like Golden Syrup out of a tin: I didn't dare let go of the door for fear of causing mass concussion. Like a doorman without a hat, or a doormat without a welcome sign, I stood and held the door open for half of the south inner city and not one person bothered to thank me.
I don't know whether this was just a particularly bad week or whether this incident made me start noticing rudeness in much the same way witch-hunters started "noticing" weird sisters, but the incidents just kept on coming. When I mistakenly handed over fiver instead of a £10 note, the cashier at a supermarket rolled her eyes and just kept her hand stuck out, repeating "Six pounds seventy please. Six pounds seventy please," like a bad-tempered parrot. As I crossed the road, a man attempted to cut into a long line of traffic, having skimmed up the lane for turning left: I and the poor woman in the car who wouldn't let him in were treated to a long blast of horn accompanied by a free-style riff of honky-tonk swearing.
I was pushed into a puddle while I let someone cross a road in front of me; people jumped in ahead of me at the bar and I was treated like an imbecile while trying to book a restaurant. This city - and, for all I know, this country - seems to be afflicted with a terrible dose of rudeness and the most astonishing thing about the plague is that most people really don't seem to care, or even worse, to be aware, that they're being rude.
Of course, rudeness is nothing new, but it used to be a dedicated weapon in everyone's arsenal of unpleasantness. It was there to be used when someone behaved in a way that was vastly incapable or hugely aggressive, when the primal part of you that wanted to line them up between the sights of a crossbow: instead, you could take pleasure in saying something cutting and rude. If you were a member of a punk band and you wanted to knock people firmly out of their easy-listening malaise, you could be ear-splinteringly rude all the time.
I'm not saying rudeness was necessarily clever or funny (because, as every nanny knows, bad manners are never funny), it was just that if someone was being rude, you knew it was because they intended being rude. Contemporary rudeness, on the other hand, seems to be a different animal altogether. Of the battery of bad manners I was subjected to in the last week or two, most seemed to be an almost unconscious rudeness, a kind of Pavlovian reflex of mild obnoxiousness that says more about a society than individual random acts of rudeness.
I know it's rather trendy to blame every one of this country's ills, from traffic jams to infestations of ants, on the money that's currently sloshing around, but there does seem to me to be a link between our new driven, business-oriented economy and the rise of rudeness. Somewhere along the line, the idea that you should be nice to people, unless you have a reason not to be, seems to have been substituted with the belief that there's no reason at all to be nice to people unless they earn it in some way.
In the workplace, we want things now; we can demand the best price; we are rewarded for being forceful and a bit bolshie if it gets things done. People who are nice and let things slide and don't push themselves forward are seen as dead weight; pleasant enough to have around, but hardly a real player. Of course, not everyone's workplace is as high-octane as this, but there is a new regard for efficiency and bullish-ness whether you're ordering envelopes or bidding for high-budget accounts.
It's worth noting that those bucking the trend towards casual rudeness include many semi-state bodies (formerly bastions of casual rudeness) who may now have to earn our custom and who are, unsurprisingly, becoming much more polite. The people in directory enquiries now tell you their name and inquire how they may help you rather than barking "Where?" repeatedly before telling you a well-known restaurant doesn't exist. The ESB sent me a very nice letter welcoming me to my new home along with my first bill; and, after Bord Gais gave me a day's warning before they locked my meter, at least the man I rang up to harangue was pleasant enough. Politeness, therefore, has become a commodity like everything else.
I wonder whether the way we now do business affects the way we deal with each other outside office hours. As I stood there like a great big lummox, holding the door open, I very much doubt people were ignoring me in order to annoy me. Rather, they probably didn't see why they should say thank you, because wasn't I the pushover for standing there holding the door in the first place? More likely still, they probably didn't pause to think that if a door was open, it meant that someone was holding it, needlessly and for no personal gain.
Rudeness is an unpleasant entity because it shows somebody doesn't care about you or how you feel. I'm sure the man who hurled all that abuse in the traffic is perfectly lovely to his mother, brings his wife breakfast in bed, and buys rounds that would keep a publican in socks for a year, but he didn't care about the woman he was trying to cut in front of and he didn't care if his abuse ruined her day. What's more worrying still is that bad manners tend to be contagious - I have stopped holding doors open and stopped standing aside to let people pass through narrow scaffoldings on the building-sites that line my route to work. It's not that I want to be rude; more that I don't want to be taken advantage of and don't want to start the day in a lather of irritation over other people's inconsiderateness.
In a society where troubled teenagers are sent to prison or left on the streets because there's no place to help them, and where people of other races are routinely abused in the streets, it might seem ivory-tower-ish to be getting so worked up about good manners. But whether or not we are decent when we have no need to be seems to me a fundamental indication as to what kind of society we are - after all, if we can't be decent to someone face to face, what hope is there of empathy for those that are faceless, never mind voiceless?
Much has been made in recent weeks of Justice Garavan's remarks about the "dreadful girls" supposedly frequenting Galway nightclubs and about the "uncivilised" nature of those who choose to go out after 12.30 a.m. I didn't give much thought to his descriptions of Galway clubbers, other than to make a mental note to party in Galway more frequently in the future, but I did pause when I heard Justice Garavan dismissing those who go out late at night as uncivilised. This is exactly the kind of ridiculous definition of civilisation that will ensure Ireland becomes a thoroughly brutish, uncivilised place for the future. Civilisation needs to be prized certainly, but civilisation of the right kind - the kind that celebrates decency to others, looks after its own, knows simple things have the greatest value, and most of all, the kind that doesn't leave me holding the door for five minutes.
Louise East can be contacted at wingit@irish-times.ie