By Any Measure, He Got Off Light

Dear Miss Manners: As I was conversing with a girl I work with, a male employee I barely know walked up to me from behind and began massaging my shoulders.

I was shocked and said, “I didn’t ask for this” - but not rudely. I didn’t even know who it was until he walked behind the girl I was speaking to and began massaging her shoulders.

She responded by groaning and rolling her eyes in ecstasy. I sensed that my conversation with her was over and walked away wondering if I was unfriendly for wanting the guy to get his hands off me when he was just trying to be nice. Massaging shoulders is obviously his way of saying, “Hello, nice to see you.”

The other girl was more friendly when she totally welcomed the massage, and her resulting conversation with him was much longer than the one she had with me. Perhaps his massage paved the way for conversation?

To me, this is an invasion of my body - an invasion that I have no idea how to respond to without being rude. I am a person who believes that the only person who has any business touching me aside from handshakes is my husband.

Please tell me the correct and polite way to respond to surprise massages in the future, Also, please say what you think of people who respond with welcoming ecstasies. Are they friendlier than the ones who shirk away?

Gentle Reader: This depends on your definition of friendly. Miss Manners has heard it called something less polite.

And speaking of politeness - yours was the friendliest way of responding - you treated the incident as if it were the miscalculation of a friend, which it was not.

You would have been within the bounds of politeness - and perhaps better-advised - to treat it as the shocking liberty it actually was. To have screamed in alarm, or to have coldly said, “Don’t you dare do that to me” are useful responses that Miss Manners condones.

She is not content to let it go at that, however. Miss Manners really must require you to pull yourself together before you allow the improprieties of others to shake your knowledge of right and wrong.

What do you mean, his way of saying “Hello, nice to see you”? What do you suppose is his way of saying he is really glad to see someone?

If you have any doubt that no one should be allowed to touch you like that without your permission, any thought that you should allow such things for professional comradeship or any other kind of professional advantage, any suspicion that it is you, rather than the office masher and his willing victim who have been behaving badly, or any reaction other than disgust and indignation to what you witnessed, you are headed for trouble.

Etiquette has always condemned such conduct as outrageous and unprofessional, not to mention disgusting. When it didn’t get results, it called in its big and unsubtle brother the law, who calls it sexual harassment and punishes it severely.

Dear Miss Manners: A young, handsome sports car salesman has a young, beautiful wife who wants a diamond ring very much. He says no; he thinks diamonds are overrated.

Instead, he’ll climb to the top of a mountain (he loves to hike) and will bring a rock from the summit just for her.

She’d rather have a diamond ring. Is she being materialistic and ungrateful, or is he being generous or selfish?

Gentle Reader: He is being shortsighted. Miss Manners can hardly imagine anything more imprudent than a sports car salesman’s spreading the word that it is materialistic to buy things for pure enjoyment. Unless, perhaps, it is a husband who turns a romantic wish of his wife’s into an opportunity for sarcasm.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Judith Martin United Features Syndicate