Or a roadway.
We get ‘cityfolk’ that don’t know how to drive mountain roads.
If you got a dozen cars behind you, it’s time to pull over and let them pass.
Great rant!
But I must take exception to Ohio being included in the category of rural hick states full of people who are afraid of cities. Ohio is a predominantly urbanized, industrial state. A lot of our hicks are URBAN hicks! 
John Carter, iffen some drunk-ass hick on vacation told me to smile as I was trudging to or from my life-draining cubicle, I woulda given the Official Massachussetts Hello.
FUCK YOU!
Sheesh. Some people don’t know how to act.
So there were a couple of thousand counts of battery at the Offspring concert I was at last year. :dubious: IANAL but there are such things as reasonable explinations. “Well your honor, I could have stood there and have been killed by the bus, but I pulled us both to safety.” “30 days, Young Chameleon!”
Speaking as a Metro user and DC suburb inhabitant, I say, “You go, Cliffy!” What the non-DC folks don’t seem to realize is that Metro doesn’t have a whole lot of room to maneuver in, especially when the station is chock-full of people. I haven’t had my knee caught in a gate, but I have been trapped in the door by my shirt for a multi-station ride, and I would definitely shove someone out of my way to prevent the door closing on my shirt or my hand. (Metro doors don’t operate like elevator doors; they don’t bounce back if they encounter an object, they crush it.)
And John Carter of Mars is an idiot. I get along fine when I visit my momma in her teensy Louisiana town because I know to smile and say “please” and “thank you” to folks, and take time to visit before getting down to business. I don’t do that here in DC because that’s not how to behave in a crowded urban environment that’s loaded with Type-A personalities.
Maybe you and your girl from Texas can figure out that you adjust your behavior to suit your environment. You also might want to figure that you are tourists out on a toot, and we’re people who live here and just want to get from Point A to Point B without some liquored-up hick telling us to smile!
And if you think DC is tough, try taking the Metro in Seoul, which is extremely crowded and where shoving and pushing to get in and out are normal.
I agree that tourists suck ass. I was on the DC Metro recently, and when I was exiting the turnstile, some gay tourist from Outer Dipshit, Montana tried to pick my pocket. Then the fucker pushed me! I was so livid I was ready to punch him out. I tried to say “Put up your guard! Put up your guard!” But all I managed to get out was “Guard! Guard!” But then a cop showed up, so I let it go.
You have my sympathies, Cliffy.
I have to say that I do find the DC Metro to be a bit confusing, and last time I was there I probably looked like the clueless tourist that I was. What the fuck is up with paying when you get off? That’s totally bass-ackwards. What happens if you can’t afford it?
Anyway I had my share of tourists yesterday. I had to get on the trolley 1 stop away from Fenway Park. On opening day.
So did you have a nice relaxing time at the Zoo?
[QUOTE=tdn]
I have to say that I do find the DC Metro to be a bit confusing, and last time I was there I probably looked like the clueless tourist that I was. What the fuck is up with paying when you get off? That’s totally bass-ackwards. What happens if you can’t afford it?
[quote]
How else would you pay unless it’s a flat fare like NYC? Look on the chart to see if you can afford it before you get on. And if you don’t have enough on your card, then you can go to the exit fare machine and put the difference on your card. No biggie.
And I don’t understand how the DC Metro is confusing. It’s one of the easiest in the world to navigage, IMO. The lines are color coded, you just have to make sure you’re going in the right direction.
Admission to the Zoo may be free, but the concession stands and the gift shop are not. The Smithsonian will let you into the Dulles annex for free, too, but you’ll pay out the ass to park.
I’m very used to a subway system with a rational fare structure and a token system, and the first time I used Washington’s I found it as confusing as it could be - even worse than London’s with its fare zones. Those vending machines are severely nonintuitive too, but someone who’s memorized the rote procedure might not notice anymore. I’d fit right in now, but be a little more charitable.
If you can’t afford to get off? That top-off-the-fare machine near the exit might help, if you can figure it out. Or you may ride forever 'neath the streets of DC, you’re the man who never returned.
You stick your card in, the machine tells you how much you’re short by and you put that amount in the machine. What’s to figure out?
Sounds good to me. In Boston, it’s $1.25 flat fee no matter where you want to go. Unless you’re coming in via the D line. Then it’s $1.50. Or 2.50. And the buses can be just $1.00. Or $1.25. Or $3.50. And the commuter rail is by zones.
Easy peasy!
Great reference! Also a great rant. I’m from Bama, and used to live in DC. It was incredible how fast I went from " now how does this thing work?" to “goddamn it, stand aside until you figure it out, you idiot tourists!”
The only trouble is the whole “physical confrontation” thing. I know it was his fault. I know he backed up into you. However, speaking from his perspective, as a disoriented tourist, if you had unexpectedly shoved me from the back in a busy Metro station…well, you would have found out what my fist, elbow, knee, shoe, and possibly the turnstile itself tasted like.
Nasty situation, but you did not handle it well. Yell, scream, insult, call his mother names, anything short of physical contact to get him moving in the right direction. But you shove him, and you deal with the consequences.
The rant, however, was just right. 
But I’m interested, Ogre, what else would you have me do? I had about a tenth of a second before he pushed me into the gate and I toppled ass over teakettle. I had already said Excuse me, politely but loudly. I had already tried brushing past him. I had nowhere to go and he was pushing me backwards. I seem to remember trying to explain to him that I needed to move past him and that he was going retrograde, but in the short amount of time I had, I couldn’t get the words out. I handled it the best way that occured to me in the split second I had to decide what to do before I got knoed over and cracked my skull open, and I challenge you to suggest anything differnet I could have done. Specifically, “You shove him, and you deal with the consequences,” – why does that apply to me, the innocent victim trying to save myself from injury, but doesn’t apply to him, the asshole, who was the one who started pushing in the first place, especially since the consequences of me pushing him were zero, and the consequences of him pushing me were serious?
I’m not being flippant – I honestly want you to provide an answer. But I’m confident you cannot do so. I’ve thought about what I could do differently in the interim, and I wish I had been able to speak more clearly to explain why he was wrong. I wish that when he started shouting at me I hadn’t raised my voice to match – not that he didn’t deserve being bitched out, because he did. But in terms of the physical contact I made with him, which both at the time and in hindsight seem to me to have been the absolute minimum I could have done to assure my safety, I have absolutely no regrets.
Thank you! At last someone understands!
–Cliffy
I dunno, Cliffy. All I’ve got to go on is one side of the story here. However, a few possibilities do spring to mind. First, his backing up into you was not a physically aggressive, confrontational act. It’s not like he decided to use his pasty bulk and keen tactical mind to corner his enemy in the box-canyon-like turnstile and grind him into powder as his faithful minions rained boulders and flaming pitch from the cliffs above. He was a dumb cow and simply backed up where he shouldn’t have. It probably never even crossed his mind that the turnstile gates could hurt someone. Hell, before I moved to DC, all the turnstiles I had ever seen were turnstiles, not those bizarre “ACCESS DENIED!” gates in the Metro.
Your shove, however, was a physically aggressive act. Like I said, if someone shoved me forcefully from the back in an unfamiliar city and situation, I probably would have regarded it as an unprovoked, full-on attack, and reacted in kind.
Also, I strongly suspect you are exaggerating the level of injury or inconvenience you would have experienced. You would not have “cracked your skull open.” You would not have ended up in the hospital with a shattered spine and as the focus of the newest Terri Schiavo-like controversy, as the pasty redneck bemoaned his terrible inhumanity in front of a CNN camera on national television. He backed up. He did not back over you with a delivery truck. You would have stumbled back, cursed loudly and justifiably, insulted his parentage, and suggested in no uncertain terms that one DOES NOT move backward in the Metro line.
And yes, I know precisely of what you speak. I lived there. I’ve had to slow my progress toward the trains a thousand times to accomodate some dumbass tourist who tried to shove a dollar bill in the slot for the Metro card. I’ve even had to deal with retrograde line movement as some clueless asshat realized he forgot to pick up his card at the end of the stile and decided to make like a Pacific salmon and swim upstream. It really wasn’t that big a deal. Annoying, yes, but hardly a Federal case (ha! DC! Federal case! See what I did there?)
Third, ever heard of “passive resistance?” Are you made of tissue paper or something? Put a foot back and a shoulder forward and refuse to move.
I absolutely believe you and I really don’t fault you for choosing to rant about the encounter in the Pit. You’ve even apologized for your generalizations.
As unpleasant as he was, he also had only a split second to decide what to do. He did not choose well. You at least have the consolation of knowing that you handled it as best you could.
So maybe you came out ahead after all.
Cliffy, why do so manyof the people with the briefcases in D.C. look so joyless? The only person we met there who seemed to have any enthusiasm at all was the paranoid schzophrenic we took to dinner.
This one’s easy – we’re all going to work and you’re on vacation.
Ogre, I most certainly am not exaggerating the injury I could have suffered. Could, not would. My center of gravity is pretty close to the top of those orange gates. If I had hit them at the velocity the goon was pushing me back, I might have flipped back over them. If so, I would have had nothing to hold onto to break my fall and my legs would have been caught up on the gates making it impossible to get them under me. Because of the narrowness of the aisle I likely wouldn’t have been able to twist to land on a shoulder, either. This was not a matter of getting squished – I can live with squished. But at the time it seemed to me not at all unlikely (albeit not likely either) that had I let the moose succeed in what he was doing I would have hinged over and landed on my head. Having been through a Metro turnstile seven more times since then, I think that’s slightly less likely than I feared it was, but still not terribly unlikely. And at the time, I was a little too engaged to do a dispassionate analysis.
–Cliffy
“Rabbit Theathon!”
“Duck Season!”
“Rabbit Theathon!”
“Duck Season!”
“Rabbit Theathon!”
“Tourist Season!?”
“Be vewwy, vewwy quiet. Weah hunting touwists. A-a-a-a-ah!”
Not that simple when some of the lines kinda swing in and out in a “U” shape rather than go straight N/S or E/W across town.
No, no, no! Dahlin’ , down 'round Northeast City Folk that means either
(a) My judgement’s impaired by drink or (b) My judgement’s impaired by Mental lllness or (c) My judgement’s impaired by overexposure to Jesus/Krishna/whoever; depending on the city, that means a 1/3 to 2/3 chance that it will be interpreted as that you’re fair game for a friendly mugging. 
They have actually SEEN exactly WHAT our national government is up to, and their job is to make it happen. YOU try looking cheerful after that. 