So I'm standing in line at the self-checkout registers at the grocery store. The 50-or-so year old woman in front of me (and the other ten people in line) is about as slow as possible. Not only is she buying way more than the 15 items allowed (not that I'm a stickler about that, but, c'mon? 30? 40?) but she chooses to pay with cash, and then carefully count out the coins to pay the exact amount.
It is 5 pm. As I said, there are ten people (now 12, now 15, etc) waiting behind her.
The self-checkout is the fast line. I, and everyone else in line, are carrying a few items each, just trying to get out of the hellhole that is your friendly neighborhood supermarket.
But there she stands, with her shopping cart full of bags that she has carefully tied and put into the cart one at a time then rearranged so the freakin' bread doesn't get freakin' squashed. Then she carefully takes her receipt from the machine, and actually stands there at the check-out counter, leaning on her cart, carefully checking every item on the receipt versus every item in her cart.
At this point I walk up and slam my microwave pizza and chips as loud as I could onto the counter right beside her (shattering the chips far beyond any dipping use now, but hey, sometimes you have to make a point) and give her my best I'm-two-seconds-away-from-ripping-your-stinkin'-throat-out look. There's a security guard 20 feet away, so I refrain from yelling (I know that someday I'll be kicked out of a grocery store raving like a lunatic but I'm trying my best to forestall turning into THAT guy for as long as I can). I'm six feet six inches, happen to be wearing black, and have a freshly shaved head, and I don't mind looking scary to strangers when they're pissing me off. Needless to say, she finally gets the point and moves along.
As I took less than a minute to ring up and pay for my groceries, I briefly wonder what the people behind me are thinking. Do they secretly congratulate me and thank me in their minds for doing what they all wanted to do? Or are they thinking "boy, that guy has got problems"?
Then I started thinking, while I was concentrating on lowering my heart rate to get the blood to stop pounding in my ears, that hey, maybe I do have problems. Yah, it might even be possible that I overreacted slightly in getting that mad at that lady.
But then I dismissed that thinking as quickly as I would walk away from that same woman if she was on fire in the middle of the street screaming in pain. I realized, I'm not just pissed at her. I'm pissed at everything she represents. There is a type of person who will take the time to realize that there are other people besides himself in the world, and life would be a little more bearable to all of us if he acted accordingly. Then there is a type of person who has never learned to think about anybody but themselves. They go through life not caring, not even realizing, that their very existence is inconvenient to those around them. Its not just unnecessarily holding up a line at the grocery store. Its sitting in the no turn lane with your blinker on, stupidly waiting an opportunity to turn the wrong way up a one way, while the cars pile up behind you. Its sitting in a drive through staring at the menu for five freakin minutes before you finally order. Its the idiot blasting his crappy music from the four open windows in his car at a red light while you're stopped beside him with a sleeping child. Its the person who pays for a 50 cent coffee at the gas station with a check, or the dumb hick who holds up everyone just buying their morning caffeine on the way to work because he has to ponder the lottery scratch-offs and which ones to buy. Its the self-absorbed, inconsiderate a-hole who won't even hold the door he just walked out of for the guy loaded down with an armful of boxes. And a million other examples.
When I get so mad over what most people would call "nothing, just a little inconvenience," I'm not just mad at that one person. I'm mad at everyone like that, and the thousands of ways they make my life a little harder every day, which add up and add up and add up, the whole time I'm screaming inside my head "WHY?!?! OPEN YOUR EYES AND LOOK AROUND YOU!!!"
Common courtesy is dead. They have no need for it on reality tv, so they have no need for it in the real world, apparently. I wish I could (as I usually do) blame it on my own crappy, moronic generation, but that is sadly not the case. Almost every example listed above has been perpetrated by every age, race, and gender.
I was reading a study the other day that will help illustrate my point. This study, based on Littlewood's Law, states that, over the hours of the day that an average human being is awake and alert, he will experience one event per second, or about a million over a 35 day span. Thus, when a one-in-a-million event happens, he should not attribute it to divine intervention, but as the probable outcome of chance.
Now, however you feel about that, let us take the same study and apply it to me getting shafted by the rest of humanity. One event per second. Figure in the amount of people I come into contact with on my average work day. I don't feel like doing the math, but I'm sure the numbers are very compelling. The long and short of it is that I have only a finite amount of patience, and there have been, over the 28 years I've been alive, a number of events forcing me to deal with the stupidity of humanity that comes so close to infinite as to make no practical difference.
I don't think I have much time left. I can see the headline now: "Man Dies Of Heart Attack Screaming At Old Lady In Supermarket." Wow, what a way to go.
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