My kingdom will not be as forgiving as yours. These elderly and infirmed were able to walk from their mode of transportation, through the line, through the revolving door, but they chose to stop once immediately inside. They are included in my decree.
I highly recommend not catching baseballs with any part of your head.
This is probably the thing that annoys me most when I ride my bike – people who wave for me to go first, even though they are the one who has the right of way.
There are the people who arrive at a four way stop well before me, sit there and wait for me to get to the intersection. Then when I stop at the stop sign, because I follow the rules of the road when I’m on my bike, they look confused and wave me through. It’s like they expected me to just blow through the stop sign. Yes, I know there are some cyclists who do that, and they make the rest of us look bad. But when it becomes obvious that I actually am stopping, they should just go rather than holding up traffic and letting me go first.
Then there are the times I’ll be riding on some minor street. Someone will drive past me, and then immediately signal a right turn. Except instead of turning, they come to a full stop and wait for me to pass them again. Except passing a vehicle that is signaling a turn is pretty much asking to get hit if they change their mind and decide to go. So I’ll stop behind them. And then we have this stalemate where I don’t want to go because I don’t want to get hit if they suddenly decide they’re going to go, but they’re stubbornly insisting that I should go first. And the thing is, if wanted to let me go first, they shouldn’t have passed me in the first place. They could have just slowed down, stayed behind me, and then turned after I passed the intersection. That would have taken exactly the same amount of time as passing me and then stopping and waiting for me to catch up to them. Actually less time, because it would avoid the standoff.
But all those other drivers who’ve put in the years and miles aren’t able… it’s a gift, man, appreciate it.
Speaking of which, another trick I can do on my bike (or driving) is think “Hmmm, I wonder if I’d get there faster by taking the main drag, or the road along the river? That’s the hypotenuse, but traffic’s slower…”
So I head for the river, and mentally send a duplicate down the main road. There’s a spot five miles later where the two routes are close, and I check to see if I’m ahead or not.
It’s not mental magic. I’m really just imagining taking the main road route in real time as I go the other way. And if I make all the lights I get ahead, and if I get held up by overly-polite idiot drivers I fall behind.
But hey, it’s fun.
In the “why are you always late” thread it becomes apparent that many people simply lack a sense of the passage of time unless they are actively paying attention to a clock. 1 minute or 10 passes exactly the same when they’re occupied. And by occupied I don’t mean “in the zone”, I just mean doing mundane things like getting dressed.
I suppose people that lack that sense of time in the long may also lack it in the short.
Nobody is doing the distance / time = speed calculations with numbers in their heads.
But if you’re time-challenged, watching how you and another moving object are converging towards a spot may be easy to perceive as a series of still-frame observations, but you can’t/don’t see it as a movie of the immediate past. A movie that could be projected forward mentally to see how it ends. If only you had the ability to process time.
It drives me nuts when people walk up to a subway turnstile (during rush hour) and then it suddenly occurs to them that they need to find some method of paying to enter.
“Let me slowly look through my purse/wallet/pockets and see if there is anything useful in here…”
Haha! Try that on the London underground and you might get trampled.
Interesting, and I’d be willing to wager it’s likely to be true. I tend to be a punctual person.
I like to give these a suitable lie for an answer. “Having a baby.” or “Getting laid, can I call you back in two minutes?” It usually stops them dead in their tracks so I’ll have a moment to get it together.
When people put their groceries on the supermarket conveyor, and orient their bottles orthogonally to its direction of travel, instead of parallelly to it, such that the bottles, being, y’know, round, start rolling all over the belt, clanking into each other, getting stuck to the side if they were placed a bit askew, and whatnot. Worse if they put them at the end of their heap of groceries, such that they have to keep scooting them forward to keep up. I’ve seen people go to astonishing lengths to try and mitigate this—build little heaps of groceries to separate bottles or act as a stop, balance bottles precariously on other groceries, using the dividers as a wedge…
The one thing I hardly ever see: just rotate them by 90 degrees, and they will not roll. How the fuck is that so hard to grasp?
I think mothers have a special way of making every telephone conversation miserable. My mom is also a big fan of the “Well, I know you’re just SOO busy” when she calls me in the middle of the workday and gets my voicemail, at my totally normal 8-5 office job where I cannot in fact answer the phone because I am exchanging labor for pay, and when I talk to her almost every day by text anyway.
Even though we talk on the phone at least once a week, maybe more, she guilt trips me every time about I haven’t called in a while even if we’ve texted earlier in the day. From bitching with my friends, it seems like all moms do this. I wish they’d realize it poisons the conversation immediately. My life is very boring, I don’t have that much to share.
This thread has more or less devolved into a list of pet peeves involving ill-considered/inappropriate behavior, rather than entirely rational and appropriate behavior that just happens to be annoying to others.
This type of behavior is not “benign and appropriate,” but rather rude and inconsiderate, not to mention dangerous, especially when debarking escalators. I deliberately shove stupid people who do this. Maybe it helps.
The second post was about an inherently inconsiderate behavior. So the rot started early.
Many of which inherently inconsiderate behaviors our society just shrugs and accepts as inevitable, despite completely reasonable alternatives being available if we weren’t collectively so damn selfish, cheap, and/or lazy.
How so? The second post was about neighbors using power tools during the day. Nothing inconsiderate about that, and the poster wasn’t saying they were wrong to do so, just that it bothered them.
Using tools in your own yard, during normal waking hours is pretty benign behavior.
Add to that the person in front of me that lets all of the cars from the merging lane in front of them.
Not an exact recreation of what I see at the stores, but lately I’m reminded of this scene from Easy Money a lot.
I live in the middle of Arizona. Its hot most of the time. When the temps have cooled to mid 80’s, I like to sit on our porch.
The mom who rents the place behind ours lets her kids out when it gets cool enough. Happy, playing children who like to shout and have fun.
The entire time they are out there I am thinking bad things and wishing it would get dark.
Neither benign nor appropriate - seethe away, I certainly do.
This. I have new neighbors to the south of me. When it’s a nice day / evening out, I’ll putter around the yard or kick back on the patio and read a book. Every other weekend and at least once per week it’s party time. Usually not raucous, but always noisy enough to intrude. Good on y’all for being social. Please go away now. Don’t any of your 40 people in your small yard have homes you could go to?