I left a scarf behind in one of the capital's very smartest hotels this week. It was a good scarf, not a great one; warm, black, with just a soupcon of cream to lighten the customary mourning air, writes Kathy Sheridan.
The person I had been meeting kindly put it in an envelope and left it there for collection. Simple. You would think.
Next day, a friend parked on double yellow lines and galloped up to the concierge inside the door. This paragon of service was on the phone, not raising an eyelash in acknowledgement.
Finally, receiver slowly replaced, he deigned to look up, and friend asked for the scarf package. Looking neither right nor left, the concierge moved out from his desk and wordlessly ushered him in to the reception area where friend (usually welcome in polite company, honest) was obliged to repeat his mission to a woman who also seemed in sole charge of the hotel's communications system.
Amid the phones and queries, she tried to contact security, attempting meanwhile to engage the idle second receptionist's assistance. Idle receptionist's shrug suggested she'd rather gut a skunk.
Finally, friend races out to illegally parked car to fetch his phone, certain he has the wrong hotel. Dialling and pacing beside the concierge's desk, he glances at a shelf behind it and - yep, you guessed it - there is the large white package where it has lain for 24 hours.
No one died. It was just a scarf, just another irritant in a whole unnecessary series of them for those of us forced to do business in the capital.
But amid looming over-capacity in top-end, Dublin hotel rooms and silly prices, combined with the slow return of common sense and an old-fashioned sense of outrage, the whole charade (an everyday occurrence, presumably) could have a nasty ending for everyone involved. Has anyone bothered to tell them?
I had similar, bad thoughts recently about one of Dublin's - Ireland's - top-rated restaurants, where the verging-on-disdainful disposition of front-of-house staff was only relieved by, of all things, a charming sommelier. Otherwise, dish after fabulous dish might have tasted like gravel.
What kind of leadership and training standards are these people reflecting?
The concierge, for one, holds the front line of that hotel's reputation, one of a team employed to justify the probable five-star rating and matching prices. Yet everything about his boorish behaviour bellowed that his need to assert his ego vastly exceeded his willingness to do his job.
His attitude to the telephone was only one aspect, but it is significant and universal.
What is it about the ring of a phone that compels people to respond so abruptly, like Pavlov's dogs? It's a response that declares that whoever the caller is, he is infinitely more important, more glamorous, more lick-worthy than you, the witless human who has made the effort to wash and dress appropriately, travel any number of miles, find and pay for a parking space, trudge all the way to their establishment and stand before them in the flesh?
Star-rating, duty and working brain cells aside, how much common humanity would have been required for that concierge to put the telephone caller on hold and address the needs of the plainly agitated man standing in front of him?
No doubt, the answer is partly rooted in the old confusion between service and servility.
It is also rooted in manners (i.e. common courtesy and decency), the true meaning of which went astray around the time someone decided that "to speak as I find" and "behave as I feel" were excellent lifestyle options and to hell with the collateral injury.
Incontinent politicians who blurt about "crap" and "clowns" are prominent in the speak-as-I-find movement. So is the Liveline caller who addresses a public office holder as "a waste of space". As is the barbarian who bellowed at another driver friend to pull in and let him pass as she recovered from the shock of a purse snatch in broad daylight from the front seat of her car.
Manners are for wimps. Protect and flaunt your ego at every turn. Make way for Monumental Me.
The end of deference has muddied things further. Liberated from old social codes, we've come to believe that showing respect to anyone will diminish us. Yet we are obsessed with being treated with respect ourselves. So we all stand poised to be offended and to offend in turn. Each day, we march out in Code Red mode, armed for aggression, slotting neatly into the savage spiral. Then tut-tut over coffee at the dissolution of society.
Two hundred years ago, the Earl of Chesterfield warned his son that men will forgive any quarrel or criticism, except one: they cannot tolerate being treated with contempt.
In November, new scientific research revealed that the brain reacts to a social slight in the same way as it does to a physical injury.
This means that every day we inflict social injuries on one another, each as painful as a fresh, physical wound.
What do we think we are about?