What’s the host’s obligation when a guest leaves an item at their house?
If guests leave stray items behind — an umbrella, for example, or, more frequently among the younger generation, their expensive refillable water bottles — how long am I obligated to hold on to these items for the owner to retrieve?As hostess, am I obligated to track down the owners and notify them of their oversight? This becomes a problem when my teen and young adult children’s friends leave behind those designer water bottles that they all carry, apparently prepared for some devastating...
When can I politely discard these items? And if I have discarded items after a reasonable time, and then someone inquires after their belongings, what is the best response?initial inquiry about the lost item to your guest list is kind — and a task to be given to your children, if the objects belong to their friends.
But if there is no response, or a reasonable amount of time passes without retrieval, Miss Manners gives you permission to dispose of the objects. At which point you may say, if asked, “Oh, I'm so sorry. I thought you had given up on that bottle.”My friend “Agnes” and her husband wanted to see my friend “Axel,” as well as his house. So Agnes asked me to ask Axel to have the three of us over for dinner.
Axel lives alone, is not very sociable and does not entertain, so instead, I asked him if he’d be willing to have us over for drinks — of which I would supply a good portion. He agreed, and then spent a lot of time worrying over it: cleaning his house and shopping for just the right drinks and snacks.
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