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.

Toy Store

I walked into a glorified hobby store this afternoon and felt as though I'd gone back in time by about two decades. The place was full of lots of colourful toys suitable people aged five and above which I remembered playing with years ago. You know, paints, stickers, block prints, copper etchings, faux stained glass. The works. The shop itself, for some reason beyond my comprehension, was situated next to a shop selling designer sarees in a relatively posh building and naturally, the prices reflected this. It made me think of a letter a friend had sent me some time ago about possible projects which could be initiated to help children living in an area in which conflict is rife.There is no reason why origami paper and coloured pencils should be the preserve of the rich. The manufacturing cost for most of the items in the shop, for example, must have been next to nothing... latex moulds to make plaster of Paris models? The same material that one can buy OTC for close to nothing in a pharmacy suddenly costs over a hundred times more simply because it's shaped like a bus. Or a building.Toys simply shouldn't be priced so high that a child doesn't have a chance to enjoy being a child without belonging to the social elite.