Hard Times Etiquette
These are hard economic times. And from what we read, hear, and occasionally experience, times will get tougher before they become alleviated so that we can breathe a collective sigh of relief and get on with life as normal. Meanwhile, massive job losses are being announced on a daily basis, with whole industries shutting down, retail businesses filing for bankruptcy, construction of homes on a downswing, and unemployment figures creeping to alarming rates.
Family breadwinners begin to join the already vast numbers of unemployed, searching for employment and dignity. Those whose jobs are still intact worry that if conditions continue to deteriorate, their jobs too will be on the line. As a result of the sub-prime mortgage debacle in the United States, hundreds of thousands of people have lost their homes, and they will inevitably be joined by others whose personal circumstances have suddenly soured.
Lending institutions have become more self-protectively parsimonious about extending credit. Impacting deleteriously, deeply so, on the fortunes of small companies unable to raise the currency required for their immediate and ongoing day-to-day coping mechanisms to ride out this storm of economic misery. Imports and exports have declined as demand dries up because goods aren't moving.
Governments hardly know where to turn to help their populations, their industries, ride out the storm of market re-structuring. They pledge, magnanimously, to proffer tax-payer funds to rescue the waning fortunes of large corporations, in an attempt to ensure that some jobs may yet be saved. They extend financial support to financial institutions whose professional oversight has been severely wanting.
And some segments of the population face a truly delicate human-interaction conundrum: how to impart their regrets to their personal assistants in various fields of endeavour, that they may no longer be able to enjoy their invaluable services. It's not that large underbelly of the population for whom scarce dollars won't adequately stretch to provide enough food for their families.
We're talking about another demographic altogether. Those who employ the services of personal trainers, house cleaners, nutritionists, therapists, pedicurists, manicurists, interior designers, aestheticians, and masseurs. Life will become ever so dreary for these precious individuals, no longer able to while away the time by indulging their creature comforts.
In the meantime, they fret about the proper etiquette, the means by which they can inform these hard-working and recently-concerned service providers that their newly straitened circumstances, real or imagined, mitigate against such luxuries as they provide. Text-messaging? Email? Telephone call?
Send along a little gift with a note indicating temporary absence, with the resolve to return as soon as the indignity of this temporary fissure in normalcy dissolves.
Family breadwinners begin to join the already vast numbers of unemployed, searching for employment and dignity. Those whose jobs are still intact worry that if conditions continue to deteriorate, their jobs too will be on the line. As a result of the sub-prime mortgage debacle in the United States, hundreds of thousands of people have lost their homes, and they will inevitably be joined by others whose personal circumstances have suddenly soured.
Lending institutions have become more self-protectively parsimonious about extending credit. Impacting deleteriously, deeply so, on the fortunes of small companies unable to raise the currency required for their immediate and ongoing day-to-day coping mechanisms to ride out this storm of economic misery. Imports and exports have declined as demand dries up because goods aren't moving.
Governments hardly know where to turn to help their populations, their industries, ride out the storm of market re-structuring. They pledge, magnanimously, to proffer tax-payer funds to rescue the waning fortunes of large corporations, in an attempt to ensure that some jobs may yet be saved. They extend financial support to financial institutions whose professional oversight has been severely wanting.
And some segments of the population face a truly delicate human-interaction conundrum: how to impart their regrets to their personal assistants in various fields of endeavour, that they may no longer be able to enjoy their invaluable services. It's not that large underbelly of the population for whom scarce dollars won't adequately stretch to provide enough food for their families.
We're talking about another demographic altogether. Those who employ the services of personal trainers, house cleaners, nutritionists, therapists, pedicurists, manicurists, interior designers, aestheticians, and masseurs. Life will become ever so dreary for these precious individuals, no longer able to while away the time by indulging their creature comforts.
In the meantime, they fret about the proper etiquette, the means by which they can inform these hard-working and recently-concerned service providers that their newly straitened circumstances, real or imagined, mitigate against such luxuries as they provide. Text-messaging? Email? Telephone call?
Send along a little gift with a note indicating temporary absence, with the resolve to return as soon as the indignity of this temporary fissure in normalcy dissolves.
Labels: Social-Cultural Deviations, Whoops
posted by Pieface @ 5:44 PM
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