"Good Manners For Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck" In Joe Sharkey's New York Times Travel Column Today
For the record, I've been a fan of Joe Sharkey's for years. It's always thrilling to appear in The New York Times (well, unless the story is that you embezzled money), but Sharkey did a particularly wonderful inclusion of me and quotes from my book, "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck" in his column today on alleviating air travel hell:

So I called Amy Alkon, the Advice Goddess, as she bills herself in her syndicated column. She is the author of two books: "I See Rude People: One Woman's Battle to Beat Some Manners Into Impolite Society," and the recently published "Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say ..." (a word that this publication is too polite to use).

Ms. Alkon has gripes, of course. A few years ago, she had a well-publicized run-in with a Transportation Security Administration agent who, Ms. Alkon asserted, became too touchy-feely during a pat-down. And she is annoyed by gate attendants and flight attendants who do not enforce rules on carry-on sizes, and "turn their backs on any roll-aboard smaller than a sarcophagus."

Still, she is very supportive of flight attendants and gate agents who have to manage the endless circus, which most do with aplomb, though some do not. "When I was researching the book, someone suggested, 'Bring candy for the people at the gates and the flight attendants' -- but I ended up not including that because I was worried that someone might think of trying to poison them," Ms. Alkon said.

"Still, since we're thrown in with strangers, isn't it nicer to have someone think, 'Oh my God, someone cared about me!' " she said. "Being nice to each other is really not that hard. When you're stuck in some unpleasantry in flying and you reach out and do something kind, you'll feel better about that horrible situation. It helps to get outside of yourself."

I especially like her suggestion that passengers simply say hello to the flight attendant when boarding. "If you walk down the street and you say hello to someone you pass, and if they don't reply, that feels really bad," she said. "It's a dignity violation. Flight attendants, they have to say hello like 100 or 200 times each flight, and how many people ignore them as they say hello at the door? Just say hello back! Or as a flight attendant said, 'Even just give me a man-nod.'"

Also from the airplane section of my book, a tip my editor loved: