In another forum, Andy (a GE commenter) asked:

Why me, Lord?
What did I ever do?
That caused you to make people touch my monitor?

Leaving aside the religious debates about suffering and God’s will and suchlike, let’s simply address it as an etiquette question.

Don’t touch other people’s monitors.

It’s that simple. Just don’t. If you have to point at something on the screen, use a pen (preferably the wrong end, though ballpoints won’t write on screens anyway). If you accidentally touch someone’s screen, apologise.

If someone touches your screen, ask them not to: “Excuse me, would you mind not touching my screen?”

If they do it a second time, ask them more stridently: “Please don’t touch my screen. The marks annoy me.” You may have to repeat this several times, if they’re particularly oblivious.

If they continue to touch your monitor despite all attempts, take out a bottle of spray cleaner or one of those special screen-wipey sheets, apologise for the interruption — “Oops, let me fix that. Hold on a moment.” — and pause the conversation while you carefully clean their grubby fingerprints from your monitor.

If they still don’t get the hint after that, you may be tempted to fight rudeness with rudeness. You could start screaming “Bad touch! Bad touch!”, or post a sign near your monitor where it’s hard to ignore: “IF YOU TOUCH MY MONITOR, I WILL COME OVER AND SPILL MOUNTAIN DEW IN YOUR KEYBOARD.”

Miss Manners says that one should not answer rudeness with rudeness. The fact of the matter is, Miss Manners probably hasn’t had to deal with the obliviousness of some geeks. Whether it’s the autism-spectrum stuff that seems to correlate with geekdom, or whether it’s something else, the fact is that geeks don’t tend to pick up on subtle social cues.

There are two ways to work around this (other than ignoring it), and both of them involve complete lack of subtlety:

1. Make your hints more and more obvious. Sometimes people just won’t take a hint unless it’s delivered from a great height, wrapped around an anvil. The downside to this is that you end up living in an environment where anvils are regularly dropping from the sky, and that’s not entirely pleasant.

2. Take them aside and speak to them as if they were three years old.

A very wise friend of mine, Zebee, once told me that the Society for Creative Anachronism was a wonderful organisation for socialising clueless geeks, because it’s an environment where it’s perfectly natural to teach newcomers about etiquette. By the time they’ve been drilled on who to call “Your Excellency”, how to behave in court, and the finer points of gallantry towards ladies, they’re usually less offensive in their everyday life as well.

Thing is, we don’t usually go up to adults in the real world and offer to give them a quick tutorial on not acting like oblivious morons. But, oddly enough, if you can bring yourself to do it, sometimes it works.

I remember I once had a guy reporting to me who, coming from a very different work background, kept asking questions or making comments about the company’s finances that the rather conservative management considered to be out of line for a mere programmer. No amount of subtle hints were getting through to this guy. Eventually, I caught him in the lunchroom and quietly clued him in, explaining about the different corporate styles, just as if I were explaining to an SCA newcomer why their lovely white belt might not be the most ideal fashion accessory.¹ It worked.

So, if you think you’re dealing with someone who could benefit from a quick etiquette tutorial, here’s how to do it:

0. Don’t jump the gun. Doling out unwelcome advice is, in itself, rude. Are you fairly certain that the person is in fact unaware of the etiquette in the case? If they’re aware but just don’t care, you may just make things worse.

1. Take the clueless wonder aside. Physically, I mean — into a meeting room, for instance. If it’s outside the work environment, raise the issue when you’re alone, or invite them out for coffee. This will provide some privacy, as well as making it clearer that this is an important conversation to be remembered.

2. Start out with some placatory noises, like, “I hope you don’t mind me raising this topic, but it occurred to me that I may not have been entirely clear before, so I wanted to set it out plainly.”

3. Clue them in. “You keep touching my monitor/stealing my pens/not answering my email/making personal remarks about my appearance/going over my head to the boss/taking long lunches when the support queue is busy, and that’s not acceptable.”

4. Explain why it’s not acceptable, and how it inconveniences others or makes them uncomfortable. “I keep having to clean my monitor every time you visit.”

5. End with more placatory noises. It can’t hurt.

If you don’t think you can manage this, then you can ask someone else — usually someone closer to the person — to do it for you. In the workplace, that’s often the person’s direct supervisor. In social situations, you might ask a closer friend if they would do it.

The only intuitive interface is the nipple; everything else is learned. This is as true of human interaction as it is of text editors. And sometimes we all need lessons.

Note 1: In the SCA, white belts are reserved for Knights — a rank which usually takes many years to achieve.