Treating People Like Dirt

2008
A few minutes ago, a man from the electricity department come to read the meter. I opened the front door; he asked me to open the back door for him to come in. I refused to open the back door: I saw no reason why he couldn’t use the front door. And there was also the matter of my being too lazy to be willing to walk to the back door.
I find it superbly annoying to be asked to open the back door to let people in but I wonder if maids/carpenters/ plumbers and apparently meter men are often not allowed to come into a house thorugh the front door. Surely, they wouldn’t ask for a back door to be opened if it wasn’t standard practice for them to use it.
As a child, I remember seeing women who would, when people who worked as secretaries in their husbands’ offices came over, not so much as offer them a chair and leave them standing in the living room, with chairs all around, for extended preiods of time.
I’ve read accounts of people behaving like this in: (a) a fifteenth century manual for domestic staff, (b) in a great deal of 19th century literature and (c) in a book called ‘The Champagne Girls’ set in early 20th century France in which an heiress who wants to become an opera singer is told that musicians and other artists are pratronised and do not become friends. They are not invited as guests; they are let in and out through a side door.
I’m a little stunned that similar attitudes exist today and that people are willing to put in a lot of extra effort for just a little extra snobbery.