Where have all your manners gone?  

I was born an old man. I've never been one for loud parties, late nights, or rambunctious adventure. I consider any event taking place after 9.30pm a social ill.  As such I've always expected that I would, earlier in life than most, become the sort of old curmudgeon you see stereotypically portrayed in the movies.

Their best years behind them, their grumpiness levels increase tenfold with each new wrinkle adorning their sagging kneecaps. Young people, they will let you know, are much ruder, more of a nuisance, than when they were young. In our day we were taught how to behave ourselves, respect our elders, and were bestowed with manners.

And it is indeed young people we tend to focus on when lamenting undesirable behaviour. Young people these days blast obnoxious music (or 'music'); young people gather in feral, hormone-laden packs; young people play violent video games and scream obscenities at each other over the interweb; young people put their feet on bus seats.

I have definitely become the grumpy old man I was destined to be (it's glorious), but to my surprise it’s not young people who draw my ire. Young people are supposed to be a bit obnoxious – they are but puppies who have only recently mastered control of their bladders and stopped relieving themselves on the kitchen floor. Can’t blame them for being a bit cocky about it.

The real problem, I find, is with those of us who are around the age of changing nappies on others, or who only recently stopped doing so. People around the age of, say, 30-55. We are incredibly rude, self-centred, and many of us seem convinced that our convenience is of far greater import than that of others. Society – and not just in Luxembourg, but certainly here too – seems to be heading in a direction where manners count for very little.

In the interest of keeping this opinion to a digestible length, here are some examples that unleash within me a rage that I can barely contain:

• Public transport – why aren't you letting people off before you barge your way onto the tram or bus? At every stop people congregate around the doors, forming half circles as though they were Roman soldiers readying for battle against a horde of barbarians. I'm surprised shields aren't commonly carried. The end result of this nonsense is only to make it harder to get off, thus slowing everyone down.
  
  
• And while we're on the tram, when did we stop offering seats to the elderly, injured, and pregnant? When did we decide that your laptop bag is more deserving of a seat than another passenger? Your phone is very interesting, I know that, but we all know that you are fully aware that we're staring at the seat your bag is needlessly occupying. Pick. That. Bag. Up.
  
  
• Queueing – You enter a petrol station and see one queue for four tills. There are eight people in that queue. Why do so many of you think 'look at those fools, all in one queue when there are four tills open!' and place yourself in a new queue? Do you honestly think we didn't realise that being a bumptious nincompoop and skipping the queue would be an option if we were raging egomaniacs? Do you perhaps live under the soft-minded delusion that we just love queues? That we wake up thinking 'gosh, I hope there's a good queue for me to join today!' Join the line, you absolute chaos goblin.
  
  
• Airplane luggage – I was on two full flights recently, and upon boarding the flight attendants announced at least 15 times that soft luggage had to go under the seat in front of you so there would be space for trollies. What do people do? Why they immediately pop soft backpacks, handbags, jackets and coats in the overhead bins, of course. Because the rules apply to lesser mortals, not to them – gods of the aisle, blessed with divine exemption from common decency. The end result in both cases was delayed departure as flight attendants had to run around freeing up space.
  
  
• And before we get on the plane, you do realise that we'll all leave at the same time, yes? Barging ahead of people in the boarding queue won't get you to the end destination any faster. It may help guarantee that your backpack fits in the overhead bins, of course, but it shouldn't be there in the first place.
  
  
• Dog turds – I've bemoaned this in two separate opinion articles (like so), so I won't bang on about it again. But pick that literal crap up, please. 
  
  
• Public bathrooms – I'm at a loss where to start. Do I go for the peculiarly male belief that one's gargantuan appendage means the correct distance from a urinal is two feet, resulting in a Pollockian pattern of pee? The universal understanding that only other people's privates are nasty, rendering void the need to wash one's hands? The fear of others' repulsive bottoms, resulting in impromptu workout sessions that sees you squatting an inch over the toilet, thus blessing it with your sacred excrement? The refusal to accept that toilet brushes are an objective reality, rather than a theoretical construct?

I can feel the burning fury of a thousand rage-fuelled flames build within me even thinking about further examples, so I'll stop there. But the problem isn't only that people engage in these despicable behaviours; just as bad is the fact that they will proudly defend them.

I recently had an encounter with a woman at an airport, who decided that queue jumping was in her best interest. There were four of us queuing for one of three of those annoying little machines where you order a burger, and she decided to form a separate queue of her own and skip right past us when a machine freed up.

This was the metaphorical straw that broke my humped back that day, and admittedly I didn't have to snap my fingers to get her attention so that I could tell her to join the queue... but that's what I did. This, she thought, was the outrage to end all outrage. Who did I think I was, snapping my fingers at her as though she were a dog? What gave me the right to treat her in such contemptuous fashion?

I'll be the first to admit that finger snapping isn't polite. But I also believe that actions have consequences, and no snapping of fingers would have occurred had she not been of the mind that we were fools for not seeing that there were, in fact, three burger machines.

Some people call it 'main character syndrome', which I think a pretty apt description. It seems many among us have come to believe that theirs is the central narrative in the world, which prima facie would place their needs and wants above those of others. The problem is that we can't all be the main character, which per definition gives us a supporting role in life's greater narrative. Perhaps it wouldn't hurt to remember that, from time to time.