Do I bargain for higher pay?
I’ve been offered a job elsewhere, at a higher salary. My boss declined her own pay rise this year, citing the uncertain economic outlook. While I respect her self-denial, and would rather not leave, it’s customary when head-hunted to leverage a pay rise in return for staying. Would asking my boss to match my rival offer be graceless?
People want different things from their salary, beyond the Micawberish hope of the month running out before their pay does. To many, the absolute amount is less important than the amount relative to other people’s salaries. Humble types say they would be happy to earn only enough to keep body and soul together, whereas Dorothy Parker specifically wanted only enough to keep body and soul apart. But while your boss may hope to set a fashionable “nudge”-style example by foregoing her own pay rise, you aren’t obliged to follow suit. For a start, she probably has more to gain by the company’s return to rude health (through, say, share options) than you do.
That said, your company is not one of those corner shops that posts a sign saying: “Please don’t ask for credit as a refusal often offends.” If your boss isn’t so keen to match a rival’s offer, she’s experienced enough to let you down without leaving your feelings too bruised. Bosses tend to know quite shrewdly where money fits into the work-wage balance. Take Alfred Hitchcock. When over-sensitive method actors used to ask him to explain their character’s motivation, the great director would just snap back: “Your salary.”
The beauty of brevity
I hate sending long emails. So I’ve started pretending that all my emails are being sent from my mobile phone by having “sent from my iPhone” as a signature. This way, I can get away with sending short, curt, badly-spelled messages. But is this rude or, worse, deceitful?
When telegrams were charged by the word, people became very polished at saying what they needed to succinctly. Today, by contrast, the cheapness of emails and mobile-phone packages make you feel like a spendthrift if you don’t use all your 1,200 monthly call minutes (even though you could read out all ten commandments in under two minutes, and recite Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in under five). This has afflicted us all with logorrhoea: 1,200 minutes is like reading Hamlet over the phone five times every month.
Lacking cost or space pressure to edit themselves, people often don’t bother. Pascal once apologised to a correspondent for writing him a long letter, explaining that he hadn’t had enough time to write a shorter one. President Woodrow Wilson used to say that it took him a week to write a ten-minute speech, two days to write a half-hour one—but if you wanted him to speak for an hour he could do that straight away. The truth is that saying the same thing in fewer words sharpens up your prose. Sydney Smith, the prolific 19th-century wit and clergyman, argued that running your pen through every other word you’ve just written injects unimaginable vigour into your writing style.
So you’re not only doing yourself a favour by sending everyone brief emails, you’re doing the recipients a big fat favour too. I could, of course, go on…
Should I stop him driving drunk?
A couple I see at parties are very nice, but he always drinks too much before driving himself and his wife home. Nobody stops him, or offers to give them a lift, or threatens to call the police; probably to avoid hurting his wife’s feelings. If he injures or kills someone while driving drunk, am I as guilty as he is?
WC Fields nailed the appropriate response to your concerns when he said he never worried about being driven to drink, he just worried about being driven home afterwards.
People drink and drive not because they think it’s OK, but because they calculate that the odds of encountering a police car on their way home are slim enough to take the risk. It’s a peculiar way to calculate the moral arithmetic of crime, isn’t it? You might just as well say there’s nothing wrong with mugging someone, providing you do it on a street that’s so deserted you’re unlikely to be caught. Drink drivers think they run a small risk of being spotted by police. What they actually run is a big risk of killing themselves, or their passengers, or a pedestrian who won’t realise that the car speeding towards them is being driven by a man who possesses the reaction reflexes of a carpet tile.
But by not stopping your drunk acquaintance from driving home, are you as guilty as he is? You’re not Batman. It doesn’t fall wholly on your shoulders to safeguard Gotham City. Why not offer to drive the couple home, or offer them a seat in your taxi? A light touch helps—share with him the great American performer Dean Martin’s advice: “If you drink, don’t drive. Don’t even putt.”
Send your dilemmas to ethics@prospect-magazine.co.uk
I’ve been offered a job elsewhere, at a higher salary. My boss declined her own pay rise this year, citing the uncertain economic outlook. While I respect her self-denial, and would rather not leave, it’s customary when head-hunted to leverage a pay rise in return for staying. Would asking my boss to match my rival offer be graceless?
People want different things from their salary, beyond the Micawberish hope of the month running out before their pay does. To many, the absolute amount is less important than the amount relative to other people’s salaries. Humble types say they would be happy to earn only enough to keep body and soul together, whereas Dorothy Parker specifically wanted only enough to keep body and soul apart. But while your boss may hope to set a fashionable “nudge”-style example by foregoing her own pay rise, you aren’t obliged to follow suit. For a start, she probably has more to gain by the company’s return to rude health (through, say, share options) than you do.
That said, your company is not one of those corner shops that posts a sign saying: “Please don’t ask for credit as a refusal often offends.” If your boss isn’t so keen to match a rival’s offer, she’s experienced enough to let you down without leaving your feelings too bruised. Bosses tend to know quite shrewdly where money fits into the work-wage balance. Take Alfred Hitchcock. When over-sensitive method actors used to ask him to explain their character’s motivation, the great director would just snap back: “Your salary.”
The beauty of brevity
I hate sending long emails. So I’ve started pretending that all my emails are being sent from my mobile phone by having “sent from my iPhone” as a signature. This way, I can get away with sending short, curt, badly-spelled messages. But is this rude or, worse, deceitful?
When telegrams were charged by the word, people became very polished at saying what they needed to succinctly. Today, by contrast, the cheapness of emails and mobile-phone packages make you feel like a spendthrift if you don’t use all your 1,200 monthly call minutes (even though you could read out all ten commandments in under two minutes, and recite Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in under five). This has afflicted us all with logorrhoea: 1,200 minutes is like reading Hamlet over the phone five times every month.
Lacking cost or space pressure to edit themselves, people often don’t bother. Pascal once apologised to a correspondent for writing him a long letter, explaining that he hadn’t had enough time to write a shorter one. President Woodrow Wilson used to say that it took him a week to write a ten-minute speech, two days to write a half-hour one—but if you wanted him to speak for an hour he could do that straight away. The truth is that saying the same thing in fewer words sharpens up your prose. Sydney Smith, the prolific 19th-century wit and clergyman, argued that running your pen through every other word you’ve just written injects unimaginable vigour into your writing style.
So you’re not only doing yourself a favour by sending everyone brief emails, you’re doing the recipients a big fat favour too. I could, of course, go on…
Should I stop him driving drunk?
A couple I see at parties are very nice, but he always drinks too much before driving himself and his wife home. Nobody stops him, or offers to give them a lift, or threatens to call the police; probably to avoid hurting his wife’s feelings. If he injures or kills someone while driving drunk, am I as guilty as he is?
WC Fields nailed the appropriate response to your concerns when he said he never worried about being driven to drink, he just worried about being driven home afterwards.
People drink and drive not because they think it’s OK, but because they calculate that the odds of encountering a police car on their way home are slim enough to take the risk. It’s a peculiar way to calculate the moral arithmetic of crime, isn’t it? You might just as well say there’s nothing wrong with mugging someone, providing you do it on a street that’s so deserted you’re unlikely to be caught. Drink drivers think they run a small risk of being spotted by police. What they actually run is a big risk of killing themselves, or their passengers, or a pedestrian who won’t realise that the car speeding towards them is being driven by a man who possesses the reaction reflexes of a carpet tile.
But by not stopping your drunk acquaintance from driving home, are you as guilty as he is? You’re not Batman. It doesn’t fall wholly on your shoulders to safeguard Gotham City. Why not offer to drive the couple home, or offer them a seat in your taxi? A light touch helps—share with him the great American performer Dean Martin’s advice: “If you drink, don’t drive. Don’t even putt.”
Send your dilemmas to ethics@prospect-magazine.co.uk
