hotel breakfasts

While this has been a nice stay in Malta once again, I have a minor complaint about the rudeness of people at breakfast. Hotel breakfasts in general are one of the showcases of trivial human rudeness. People who are normally probably quite nice will think nothing of rushing ahead of you to seize the last empty table to which you are clearly walking; reaching around and past your body to grab the last pancake, muffin, or apple for which you were clearly already reaching yourself; and other things of that sort. None of them are day-destroyers, since they are far too trivial. But they do show adults acting more like 10-year-olds than is usually the case.

A number of factors play into this, but I think one of them is simple inexperience. None of us stay in hotels all that often compared with our stays at home, and the intervals between our hotel stays allow us easily to forget the hotel etiquette that we would easily build up in a couple of weeks if we were to make an extended stay.

One’s anonymity in a hotel also play a role, most likely. But we are perfectly capable of being polite to strangers in other contexts even when it cuts against the grain of our narrow self-interest.

Where else are people incredibly rude? On airplanes, I guess. Very, very rude. But in other public situations, people rise to the occasion and tend to show very good manners. I’m having trouble finding a pattern for all the variations one encounters.