A friend, moving into an assisted living arrangement and clearing out his home of all kinds of stuff, gave me an old book, copyright in 1978 –The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette.  It covers everything from home, weddings, funerals and business.  Some of the business rules seem to apply to an office that runs like “Mad Men” and I doubt that many operate that way in the modern world.  Things like “Be a Neat Smoker.”

But under the heading “some Office Do’s and Don’ts”  I found some common sense items:

DO:

• Offer to do errands for others if you are going out
• Be creative in helping others in the office
• Send a handwritten note to the home of an associate who has received either good news or bad news.
• Do think of the night cleaners
• Keep the rest rooms neat and tidy

DON’T

• While on a business appointment, don’t stay too long. One should arrive on time
  state one’s case and be gone.
• No one should chew gum in the office
• The constant muncher looks very jarring
• Don’t borrow colleagues things from their desk
• Don’t drop by another person’s desk to chat just because you are not busy at the moment. That person may be too polite to tell you he is meeting a deadline and must be left alone.
• Don’t read magazines at your desk if you are not busy.  One can always pass free time learning more about company operations instead of finding out about the latest fashions.

A statement on letter writing was very poignant (remember this is 1978!):  “We are not living in a world of letter writers, but rather of fast communicators, with no motivation to pursue the beauty of expression.”  “There is nothing more pleasant than receiving a beautiful letter.” 

And these comments on Christmas cards seems very meaningful to me:

  “The only real card in the spirit of Christmas is one signed by hand or one with an engraved or printed name combined with a brief message.”  And “When the sending of Christmas cards begins to take on gargantuan and impersonal proportions, the time has come to reconsider the entire project.  If others notice you have stopped sending cards, they will probably cross you off their over-swollen lists with relief.”

Maggie Flartey Kaminski, CEO, CRB

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CENTURY 21 Select Group
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“Mosquito is out,
it’s the end of the day;
she’s humming and hunting
her evening away.
Who knows why such hunger
arrives on such wings
at sundown? I guess
it’s the nature of things.”
-   N. M. Boedecker, Midsummer Night Itch

Then followed that beautiful season… Summer….
Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the landscape
Lay as if new created in all the freshness of childhood.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation.  If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you.  ~Erma Bombeck

It’s spring fever.  That is what the name of it is.  And when you’ve got it, you want – oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so! 

~Mark Twain

It’s tangible, it’s solid, it’s beautiful. It’s artistic, from my standpoint, and I just love real estate.
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Ring out the old, Ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

~Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1850