Miss Manners: My emails keep disappearing into the void

DEAR MISS MANNERS: My children’s school district is the first organization I’ve dealt with in my professional career in which employees routinely ignore their customers.

I make an effort to ensure that the person I’m reaching out to is the appropriate person for my question; I send a focused, respectful email, and I receive no response. In one instance, I suspect I didn’t receive a response because I was inquiring about something they had done that they’re not allowed to do. But in other cases, it’s a mystery.

I wrote to the vice principal to ask if my child could attend a community youth leadership conference without it being counted as an absence. The registration deadline came and went with no response, and now it’s too late.

I reached out to another person at the school, whom conference organizers said was their contact person, to ask if she would be willing to give us a heads-up about next year’s conference when she receives the materials. Again, no response.

It’s confusing, because our child’s previous school had six times more students and this didn’t happen there. What is the polite way to communicate with people who ignore you when there are no other people to turn to?

GENTLE READER: People in your situation – which, eventually, is everyone – sometimes come to believe one of two misperceptions.

The first is that, ultimately, one has to abandon politeness to get a response. The second is that there is no one else to turn to.

One of the few saving graces of bureaucracies is that there is always someone else to turn to. That is how Miss Manners is able to remain polite, knowing that persistence with the boss, the boss’s boss, the boss’s boss’s boss and – in extreme cases – school board members and other publicly elected officials will eventually make someone realize that it is easier to fix the problem than to continue to ignore it.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: My wife and I were meeting another couple at a restaurant for dinner, and we arrived 15 minutes before our reservation time. The other couple was not in the waiting area. After my wife and I sat for a while, we checked with the hostess and were informed that our dinner companions were already seated.

When we located them in the dining room, they had already ordered drinks. Though we didn’t say anything, I felt it was rude for them to have proceeded without us. I thought it was common courtesy to wait until the entire dining party could be seated at the same time.

I know that many restaurants insist that all members of a party be present before they are seated, but this obviously was not the case here. Am I missing something?

GENTLE READER: Restaurants refuse to seat incomplete parties to maximize revenue, not manners. But as the practice is not uniformly applied, Miss Manners recommends that polite diners share their whereabouts directly with one another upon arrival – a practice made relatively easy by ubiquitous cellular telephones.

This does not preclude proceeding to a ready table, though she agrees that ordering before everyone is present should be kept to a minimum.

Please send your questions to Miss Manners at her website www.missmanners.com.