Etiquette

Since when did the office become a peddlers bazaar? The guy in the next cubicle is pushing wrapping paper to fund his kid's school. A friend in accounting asked you to sponsor her 5K run for leukemia research. Holiday wreaths are for sale in the cafeteria, with proceeds going to a local homeless shelter. 'Tis the season for giving. And for asking: How do you fend off the annual onslaught of office hawkers without being labeled a Scrooge?

Meredith Red is a screenwriter who knows nothing about making noodles. And she likes it that way. So the pasta maker she received as a wedding present became the gift that kept on giving. Sometime around her first anniversary she passed it on, never used and freshly wrapped, to a friend who was getting married. "She was thrilled," said Red, a Los Angeles resident. "She had me over for pasta."

We have been waiting for bread for nearly two hours in a rubbish-strewn lane behind a supermarket. It is midmorning, the sun already blazing down on the 50 or so people in line, when three policemen stroll to the front. A low rumble of discontent rolls along the line, like thunder. Then a stranger named David Kaodza materializes behind me, out of nowhere. "I was right behind you, remember? You saw me before." He has a ready smile and the ingratiating patter of someone jumping the queue.

The grape tomatoes looked harmless enough, nestled among the lettuce leaves and shredded cabbage on 100 salad plates. Actually, they were land mines, as lethal as the olives lurking nearby, capable of snuffing out the careers of the UC Irvine business students before they had landed their first jobs. Fortunately, the students were in the presence of etiquette maven Ann Marie Sabath.

Cuban-born Maria Carreira, the coauthor of two college Spanish textbooks, can glide easily between her native tongue and English. But in her daily life in Southern California, picking which language to speak can be very complicado. Such as the time when she was at a taco stand where everyone seemed to be ordering and chatting in Spanish. Carreira started placing her order en espanol, but she quickly switched to English after she got a look at the young employee behind the counter.

Scott Sing has had a tire iron hurled at him, a water bottle thrown at his head and been bombarded with racial epithets. And all he was trying to do was ride his bike on Los Angeles city streets. His cycling and running brethren tell similar tales -- of being peppered with flying objects, cursed or otherwise assaulted -- and those don't even include the stories of near-misses and actual collisions.

Dave Legeret silently fumed as the man seated beside him on the plane blasted techno music on his iPod at full volume. "It was kind of rude," recalled Legeret, 38, a jewelry designer from Sandy Hook, Conn., who was forced to listen while flying from New York City to Disney World with his wife and 8-year-old son. "Listen to it at a level that just you can hear it and everyone else doesn't have to be subject to it." Apple Inc.'

WHEN Lizzie Post crammed into a Volkswagen Jetta last year for a three-day, cross-country road trip with a good friend and her cousin, plus a chinchilla named Bea and a cat named Denim, she knew far more was at stake than choosing the right fork or making proper introductions. She had no doubt that road-trip etiquette could mean the difference between arriving at the destination still speaking to everyone or fantasizing about ditching a nettlesome passenger at the next rest stop.

THEY'RE not asking for a soul shake, but most patients want their physician to at least shake their hand when first introduced and about half prefer to be addressed by first name, according to new research from Northwestern University. The study, published last week in the Archives of Internal Medicine, involved a nationwide telephone survey of 415 adults. In it, researchers at Northwestern University in Chicago found that 50.