Friday 23 November 2007

Ignoramii :-(

I know we're getting close to Christmas, which seems to bring out the worst in everyone, but I wonder why there are so many ignorant people walking our streets nowadays?

I'll explain....

At work, like many other railwaymen, I wear a bright orange Hi-Vis jacket. In the right light they can be seen for, ooh, about two miles. And yet on Wednesday whilst walking through the city centre wearing my nice bright-orange-highly-visible coat I must have had half-a-dozen people have to take last second avoiding action so they didn't walk into me.
Most of them had been walking straight at me, and looking straight at me, for a hundred yards or so, walking past other people and so could clearly see that I had nowhere to go; they'd have to walk around me...

The other stunt I've noticed more and more of recently is people who look at you but then pointedly look away, and keep looking away, as they walk directly at you - as if they think that if they look away from you, if they ignore you, you don't exist.

I'm 6' tall and weigh in at about 15 stone. When they walk into me they find I definitely do exist!


Final rant for this day: take a handful of people, two, or three, or four, walking together on a footpath wide enough for them but not then for anyone to walk past in the other direction. Why, oh why, do those people not gracefully give way to people walking the other way? Just like the ignoramii above, I've had people deliberately block the path until it's obvious that they're not going to force me into the muddy verge, or onto the road into the path of traffic, and then only give way with obvious bad grace.

And as for the woman who kept pulling her husband back alongside her when he was trying to step back behind her to make space for me and a couple of other people to walk past... What can I say?

OK, rant over for the day!

But... is it just me, or have you noticed the same behaviour? Comments welcome!

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