Well yes, of course there are people who genuinely have problems and of course I’m not pitting them. But when it’s between 20% and 50% of the users doing it, I’m sure that doesn’t cover them all.
Can I add the people at church and other such gatherings who, upon leaving the service/event, file out of the room … and then stop in a gaggle right outside the doors to chat? Or worse yet, right in the middle of the aisle?
I completely understand, and as I noted in my OP I understand that there are those that for whatever reason can’t go with the flow.
However my OP is not aimed at you. It’s aimed at the ignorant people who remain unaware of their surroundings and hold people up because of this. Clearly, you are not one of those people.
This seems to stem from those with the attitude of “It’s not something I participate in, so I have no respect for it.”
Reminds me of a set of tennis courts in the inner city that I used to play on which had a gate on one side near a subway exit and a gate on the opposite side. Subway exiters would invariably come through one gate and walk across the court in the middle of a tennis match to exit on the other side. However, I never once saw people in this neighborhood do that in the middle of a handball or basketball game.
My right ankle was immobilized surgically several years ago. I have to wear a plastic leg brace, and I walk slowly and with a limp. I stick to one side when I walk, and because of momentum issues, I’m careful around corners and intersections.
And I run into these people. How the hell can they be walking slower than me? I mean wtf is so engrossing that you have to walk like a fucking pothead in a Twinkie factory? Yeah yeah yeah too beautiful, they should have sent a poet, fuck you, move. Or do you just not value your life? You know, that finite amount of time you have on this planet, the time you’re wasting right now? Oh, and you’re not just wasting yours, you’re wasting mine too. To paraphrase Henry Rollins, it’s like you’re killing me, just a little bit, with a really tiny knife. See, I value my time, and I don’t feel the need to waste it trying to take even slower painful steps trying to get around this human cholesteral in the arteries in this city. Yes I just compared you to oily disgusting clumps of life threatening cholesteral. The bad kind. Now fucking get out of the way.
applause
I get stuck behind the people you describe, and it’s physically uncomfortable for me to move that slowly. I give the elderly a bit of slack, but what really burns my bacon are furshlugginer teenagers who move like slugs. I have the misfortune of working with a bunch of teenagers and twenty-somethings, and I find utterly appalling the fact that at 41 years of age, I’m still moving faster at the end of a 16-hour shift than these kids are in the middle of their six-hour shifts. Like the people you describe, these kids are utterly oblivious to the fact that there are other people around them trying to get work done. It never occurs to them that the middle of a hallway is not the place to gather in groups to chitchat, when there are people working who need to move through that space. They don’t get “what’s wrong with this picture” when they park fully loaded carts in doorways and then walk away.
Ungeniuses*, the lot of them.
*“ungenius” is a word I coined to describe these people, because calling them “idiots” is unkind.
I would like to point out that, that area of Sydney and I’m guessing the Las Vagas example as well, is where tourists go year in, year out. How many of you like to slow down, take in the sights and chill out whilst on holiday - count me as one.
Cut them some slack - emotional intelligence is something that is developed over time - I can’t believe you were so very different from these young people.
Oh, a timely bump of this thread…
I just got back from (duh duh DUH duuuhhh) Orlando (Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure), and spent the week dodging these gits. In the vast amounts of time spent waiting for them to GETTHEFUCKOUTOFTHEWAY!, I came up with a theory…
There’s now a hybrid of sloths and humans that are infiltrating the world’s population…
Here’s what I think’s happening…the sloth/humans travel in large groups; unable to think and reason on their own they must commiserate nearly constantly to make sure they don’t fall off the edge of the world or something. They have to stay in the exact middle of the way through and cover as much of it as possible to keep the concrete from flying up and swallowing them. It’s very hard for them; they waddle ten steps, then the whole group stops, then they commiserate again. I couldn’t understand their sloth/human pidgeon, but I from the body language, I think it went something like this:
“OK, whew, that’s ten steps! Whatever shall we do now?”
“Wait! I don’t understand! Why are we walking?”
“We have to keep the concrete from flying up around us, duh!”
“OK, everybody ready to do ten more steps?”
“Ummmm, I don’t know, do you think it’s possible?”
“Of COURSE it’s possible; we’ve been doing it all morning.”
“Yeah, but why?”
“To keep the concrete from flying up, that’s why!”
“Hey, why don’t we walk over there to the right, in the shade?”
“BLASPHEMER! You KNOW we must never leave the center of the way through!”
“OK, OK, everybody, let’s do 10 more steps!”
“What’s the dang hurry; we’ve got all day, and we’re the only people here, as far as I can tell”
“Well, maybe there’s something interesting up ahead”
“Yeah, like the edge of the world…I’m staying put!”
“No, no, we have to see some of the, um, what are we doing here?”
…and so on.
And yes, apparently the left lane of I-95 is the only safe place for sloth-brains to drive, as well.
I’m going to die of a fucking heart attack cursing sloth/humans with artery-pounding vitriol. :mad:
At the Loyola Lakeshore campus the largest classroom building is 10 stories and covers the area of a football field. Apart from two stairwells that are packed for the first three flights and a single, tiny elevator, the only way to get to the upper floors is via the escalator. At peak hours you literally have people tripping over each other at the end of each escalator, usually because some totally solid bro or provocatively dressed coed got so engrossed in some omg lol kewl ^^
text that they couldn’t help but pause and become totally oblivious to backing up perhaps thousands of their peers.
'Course, that’s not such a problem if you’re so into vigorous exercise that you want to climb 10 flights or enjoy waiting for the elevator to hit every floor on the way down while some insipid fuck keeps the doors from closing as a consequence of strapping gear on his back to scale K2 so he can be prepared for anything to go to his one 50 minute intro to situational awareness class.
But that’s an issue for another day.
Bring an airhorn along next time. Loads of fun!
Oh, and some might find this thread interesting:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=400184&highlight=sidewalk
Well, yeah. I’ve actually come to the conclusion that they simply haven’t “learned to work” yet. Of course, when you combine these kids with a labor union, it doesn’t take them very long to figure out just how hard it is to get fired, so that doesn’t help. In 24 years in the work force, I don’t think I’ve heard the words “ten minute break” as often as I have in the 16 months I’ve been at this job.
The different jobs around this place are intertwined in such a way that I can’t finish my job until they’ve finished their job. I’ll get as much of my work caught up as I can, and then go check on them to see how close they are to finishing their end so that I can finish mine. I’ll find them 7/8ths of the way done, and sitting on their asses because “it’s time for our ten”. Which means I have to stand around that much longer, because I can’t finish until they’ve finished. Big deal, an extra 10 or 20 minutes? It actually means more time than that. If some of those kids are in high school and it’s a school night, child labor laws dictate that they have to be sent home at the end of their scheduled shift (if they’ve worked a certain number of hours that day) or by a certain time of night, whether the task is completed or not. If the work isn’t finished by that time, it needs to be completed by the remaining out-of-high-school staff, and a smaller crew means that last bit of work takes even more time. And after I’ve already been working 15+ hours, I just want to finish my work and go the hell home (which is why I choose to not take many of the breaks to which I’m entitled). And it goes down the chain: the janitor has to wait for me to finish before he can do his work.
But you’re correct — I was the same way when I was that age. Except my bosses back then wouldn’t put up with it (same bosses who taught me how to count change instead of depending entirely on the cash register display). When I was 17 and working my first job, I got suspended from work for two weeks for dragging my ass too much. It worked — I didn’t drag my ass any more. Of course, I didn’t have the “benefit” of a union back then, either.
Now all of ya! Get off my lawn! shakes cane
Askance and Threnody
I’m totally on your side. I just answered the question to cure what seemed a bit of honest curiosity. Though I’m bad at stairs, I still move a pretty good clip on flat ground, and the idiocy of people who insist upon walking abreast in an area not wide enough to do so, or those who stop in obvious throughways and clog traffic just drive me bonkers!
It happens downtown ('specially now, during tourist season) a lot. And our sidewalks are really only wide enough in most places for 2 people. Which means if you’re approaching someone, and you are in a group, the other person approaching you isn’t going to be able to CLIMB THE FREAKING BUILDING next to them or beam up out of your way! GAAAAAH!
This happens so frequently that usually I just stop in place and wait for them to come out of their daze and realize that there is an object in their path and that that object cannot move to the side due to a building being there, nor to the other side due to the 2 friends at their side also approaching the “object”!
And then they have the audacity to act shocked that someone else is on the sidewalk. I swear, one of these days, I’m going to muster my iciest old lady voice and say something like "perhaps you’d like me to climb this building to my right, or maybe Capt. Kirk can beam me out of your way?, since there is nowhere for me to move TO you idiot! " (no wait, strike that last part, that’s not icy old lady, that’s CRAZY old lady :D).