I’m in the grocery store, purchasing standard things. I go through the checkout line, bags in hand, and amble towards the exit.
My ambling is brought to a stop because of a cart parked just about perpendicular to the flow of exit-traffic (of all the places to park oneself, that’s not the best of them). That’s certainly nothing unusual; I sometimes think other people have a maximize-aisle-inconvenience gene that passed me by in the great birth lottery. The unusual part was that the driver of the shopping cart-dam was quite busy lecturing at his small child, about how said child needed to move, you can’t be blocking the aisle like that.
After a few moments of this, he happened to glance behind him with that blankly-dull “oh! other people besides me are in public!” look those with the max-aisle-inconvenience gene always display, and moved his cart. Slightly.
I just hope his child could appreciate the irony going on, because then there’s hope that the cycle will be broken.
I’d love to chime in with a “yeah, isn’t it funny when other people get caught being idiots” except that I have actually been that idiot. More frequently than I care to admit. :o
My standard response when caught? “My heart was in the right place… unfortunately, my head was in my ass. Sorry 'bout that.”
It also just occurred to me that it wasn’t ironic at all; I was likely projecting my own preconceptions onto the bit of the lecture I overheard. “You can’t block aisles like that”–now, I took that to mean admonishing against blocking aisles in general.
But on reflection, I think that was in error. The “like that” was the key. Small child, not much square footage to his footprint, and thus simply not very efficient at blocking up traffic. Slowing it down, sure, especially if he’s in Brownian-motion wander around it, but not blocking it entirely. “You can’t block aisles like that–you have to use a cart like this.”