I have to agree with her. You used to be able to drive into work in the morning and have a reasonably pleasant commute. But now all you hear are people honking their horns because you don’t turn fast enough or you don’t take off fast enough when the light changes to green.
Then you have those people that think they are Mario Andretti or
But anyway…that is my co-workers rant for today; I’m just empathizing with her. My rant today is boys/men that don’t open the door for a lady.
I’m not arguing that point. I’m simply going to tell you a story of what happened to me the other day. During the lunch hour, I had to run to my local bank to make a deposit. Usually I do all my banking in the ATM or online or on my smart phone, but I had cash and that meant a trip to the bank itself.
After I finished my transaction with the teller I stepped back to turn and head out the door. At the next window there was a boy, about 20’ish and he stepped back as I was behind him and he almost knocked me down. He kept going and didn't say anything. My reflexes moved me to say, “Excuse me”. I didn't say it in a sarcastic tone, I said it in a sincere tone like I say when I cross in front of someone, it’s just reflex to be polite. He said nothing and continued to the door.
The bank has two sets of double doors. The first double doors open into a small foyer where there are two ATM machines, and then there is another set of double doors that lead to the outside. When we got to the first set the boy opened the door and waited for me and I said “Thank you” and smiled. Then we got to the next set of doors and the boy stood to the side…I kid you not…he stood to the side and looked at me as though to say “Ok…it’s your turn to get the door for me”. I just stood there, unsure of what to do, but he wasn’t going to open the door, so I opened the door and held it for him and he walked outside without a thank you or a have a nice day or anything. He just walked out. . .
And I think anyone that is old enough to remember Gladys Ormphby should have the door held open for her! Am I right?
I don't remember Gladys but I never paid much attention to tv show characters. I still agree with you though. I had the same thing happen recently. My 85 year old father and my 60 year old self were approaching a door on one side as a much younger man approached it from the other. We slowed down to allow him to hold the door for us. Instead he opened it and walked right by us. Dad and I were dumbfounded.
ReplyDeleteI have had that happen as well! It's just shocking that there is absolutely no respect or consideration for either women or the elderly! Not that I'm calling you elderly Grammy, I meant your 85 year old father :)
DeleteThanks for stopping by!
Poor fellow. No one taught him a scrap of manners. He will be disadvantaged and he'll likely never know why.
ReplyDeleteYes, it is unfortunate. I know I taught my son better, and even my daughter when it comes to doing things for those older than she is!
DeleteThanks for stopping by!
Sad.
ReplyDeleteIsn't it though! :(
DeleteI have actually had the opposite experience, I have found many of today's young people far more polite and courteous than years ago. Of course, there is always the exception. As a member of the me generation, I didn't see many acts of chivalry in my young adult years. I would also say that I have found many more rude elderly people than young people. To put this in perspective I am 64. I have had young people of both genders hold a door for me and call me sir. Like the Three Stooges in search of gentleman, I looked around and saw no one but me. Lest you think I have a commanding presence and people are regarding me as an elder statesman, I am a slob.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that your morning commute has less to do with a societal lack of manners and more to do with traffic density. One can drive on the road at 60 mph in light traffic and be quite content. Load up the traffic to where it is almost bumper to bumper and that same 60 mph is oppressively slow. I think several things are at work. One I have noticed that people often want to be first. I frequently have people behind me make something of a production of passing me as though I had no right to be on the road then end up going slower than I was. I will pass them at the same speed I started out and then they wake up and do it again. They have to be first. Fine be first but how about maintaining your speed. I don't feel that I should have to slow down so that they can maintain some alpha status. The problem in heavy traffic, these natural leaders of the pack can't get ahead so of course they do all this nutty stuff, like if they get 10 cars ahead it is going to profoundly improve their life. The other thing with heavy traffic is that you have to pay close attention and people underestimate the difficulty of driving a car. When you know how to do it, it seems the easiest thing in the world. But in order to get an appreciation for how difficult it is, remember back to when you didn't know how to drive. We do most of our driving in our sub-conscience. Think of how often you drive someplace in light traffic and you have no recollection of the trip. Driving becomes something of an automatic subroutine and you can do it almost effortlessly to your conscience, but mean while in your skull there is a tremendous number of computations, judgements, searchings, and decisions being constantly performed. While it seems easy, it really isn't, again remember how difficult it was to drive before you knew how. All that difficulty is still there, but you have relegated it to something perhaps more thoughtful than digestion, but definitely under the surface.
To give you an idea of the complexity involved, when you are driving 60 mph, you are moving 88 feet per second. One thousand one...you have moved 88 feet. Our eyes and brains can discern about 25 flashes per second any thing faster and we see a constant light. So using that as a crude measure (a flash has no image density to be formatted and discerned) at our image processing frame rate, at 60 mph we are moving better than 3 feet per frame. The truth is probably 2 or 3 times that figure. So we move down the road thinking our vision is instantaneous but really we are always seeing something slightly in the past. So driving is difficult, it just seems easy.
Oooppps too long continued below.
Always love your comments Sextant!
DeleteAs to your first paragraph, I am glad that you have had a different experience. Maybe it is a man/woman thing? No one ever said during the women's right movement that you couldn't still continue to hold open the door and show respect to elderly gentlemen, no matter how big a slob! Maybe the thing that stuck in peoples minds is not holding the door for women...period, young or old? Maybe your neck of the woods just has nicer people in it? But quite frankly, I run into the rudeness of youth in my part of the world ALL THE TIME! It's sad, truly.
I'll get back to you on the rest as I'm at work and duty calls!
Maybe looking decrepit helps! Sorry you have such philistines in your area.
DeleteI think it is philistines in this area. I also get very upset about the amount of trash in our streets, roads and parking lots. People just don't have an self respect or respect for others!
DeleteOff to read comment #2!
Continued from above. Well maybe, I can't remember where I put the break and I copied the entire post. Won't know for sure until you publish it.
ReplyDeleteWhen you get into heavy traffic, these automatic routines are transferred back to your conscious, now instead of your brain driving the car automatically, you are driving it and it has a tendency to make one cranky. So because people are now forced to do their own driving than letting the autopilot in the brains do it for them things get a little raw on the emotional side. Combine that with the inability to take a momentary break, emotions can get very raw. The final problem is that when we get into our cars, it is like being in a mini-house. What is a house? A person's castle. Who is the monarch? You are. So we go down the road being tin crowned monarchs of our mobile mini-duchies and we don't suffer insult of invasion lightly. Maybe if we all drove convertibles with the roof down we would be kinder.
Traffic fascinates me, unless I am sitting in it. Have you ever been on an interstate during holiday traffic? I tend to avoid these things, but when I worked it always seemed our product schedules got things so I had to be on the road during holidays. So I have some bad memories of it. Anyhow have you ever experienced where you are riding along at 70, all of sudden the traffic comes to a halt? Like slam on the brakes and start praying type of halt. Then you sit, then you go a 5 mph and then suddenly you are off again at 70, only to repeat it. You think there must be accident, but there never is any explanation. They found from studying traffic with satellites, that when the traffic density gets to a certain critical level, the traffic becomes subject to wave mechanics. The wave length may be 20 miles! Which is why they have to study it with satellites, you can't see it with aircraft. So what happens is that the traffic is moving say at 70. The road goes up a hill. A tractor trailer slows down to 60 in the right lane. Another truck gets in the left lane and passes the truck at 60.0005 mph. (You know the ones, the truck in the left lane gains an inch per minute on the truck in the right lane. Hows my driving? 1 800-F*** YOU!) Everyone puts on their brakes. This putting on the brakes moves back through traffic and at some point begins to get exaggerated...it is a crest of a wave forming. As the wave moves back the road it keeps building in intensity so that at some point the cars are slowing more and more to the point where 20 miles back you are going 70 and suddenly all the traffic comes to a screeching halt. It is sort of like a flow of corks piling up at a restriction. It requires fairly heavy traffic. Breaks in the traffic stop the wave form from building just like a stone dropped in one mud puddle will not create waves in the adjacent puddle. Vehicles are the medium of the wave and without a medium the wave peters out. Everything, you wanted to know about traffic, but was afraid to ask.
Still too long. I am an idiot.
lol, if you were an idiot this would not be so fascinating!
DeleteYes, you are right! About the traffic coming to a halt for no reason! I've often wondered about that myself! But hey, let's not pick on the truck drivers, they are my bread and butter!
What a cool way to describe it...the crest of a wave...yes! I can see it! Cool! This is all fascinating, how do you know this stuff?
I think I read about the wave forms in a magazine article. The rest I would like to think I thought up myself but is probably vague recollections of a book on traffic cleverly named Traffic.
Deletehttp://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says-About/dp/0307277194/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1378913371&sr=8-4&keywords=traffic
I started to read this book, was thoroughly fascinated with it and then got off on something else and left the book half read. The process of driving is one of my fascinations. For instance, I like listening to Radio Lab episodes. If I try to do so at home, I get real fidgety. Yet in the car, in light traffic, not only can I listen to them but I seem to have a very improved retention of them. Yet in heavy traffic, I would turn the damn thing off. I might listen to very relaxing music, but not Led Zepplin. I listen to Led Zepplin when I am driving and I get aggressive. What the hell goes on? Am I some kind of nut? This absolutely fascinates me. There is something about driving that shuts down all the bullshit chatter box sources in my brain and I get into a semi-contemplative state...if traffic is light. Heavy traffic gets me in the mood to start a nuclear war. Never vote for me for president!
I never stopped to think about it, but what you say is probably true, about driving and how it affects us. I know that I love to listen to music while I drive, even talk radio, but if I have anyone with me I do not turn on the radio at all. And yet some people love to have it chattering in the background, it irritates me and makes me nervous. Same with a TV, unless I am specifically watching a program, I turn it off.
DeleteI think you should finish the book and do a post about it. I find this fascinating!
Alicia,
DeleteWe must be birds of the feather. I can not stand the radio or TV on in the house unless I am specifically devoted to the program at hand. If my wife if watching TV and I am trying to concentrate on something, I put in my earplugs that I wear when cutting grass!
That's what I need! Earplugs! Good idea. I'm easily distracted. Do you think it's because we have super human hearing? I know that I hear everything, just like I can smell everything! It's difficult being so sensitive to sound and scents! People don't understand that, they think I just can't concentrate but it's distracting to hear the TV and someone's conversation and a lawn mover going outside and birds and crickets, not to mention the noise in my own head!
DeleteMy hearing is not bad per se, but I wouldn't call it super sensitive. It has been blasted by guns in my youth, jet engines (out your way) in my early 20s, and 8000 horse power motors in my adult years. Yes I wore ear protection, except the guns, but I still have pretty good case of tinnitus. It sounds like I have my own jazz drummer working the brushes on a set of cymbals and tapping a tambourine in my head. So actually I like a little ambient noise to cover that up. I live close to an interstate...plenty of ambient noise. My wife hears human voices much better than I do, I hear mumbles which is not a problem with the ears but the brain, I can hear rather well but can't discern what is being said. I hear ambient sounds much better than my wife. Agreed on lawn mowers, sweepers, weed wackers, guns, loud mufflers, leaf blowers, and chainsaws. I disagree on birds and crickets...I love hearing both.
DeleteSo what about the ubiquitous TV in waiting rooms? I want to read my book, and I hear Katie or the Chew. I look around nobody is watching the stupid TV but it is on at 120 dB.
Scents I despise as well. I would like to charge the inventor of Fabreze with crimes against humanity. Not only do we live in a far smellier world because of that crap, it is far dirtier world as well. All you have to do to a hotel room or rental car is spray a little frigging Fabreze around, forget cleaning.
Same same for smelly candles, and excessive perfume and colognes. Experiencing one's fragrance should be by invitation only! Quite captivating under those circumstances. When it is leaving a wake in an office corridor that overpowers the rotten Fabreze, one needs a gentler touch on the atomizer.
Same same for some of these smelly fabric softener sheets that people use in their dryers. That can wipe out half a neighborhood.
Do you feel your sinuses quiver when you get exposed to a strong perfume? I actually get a buzzing sensation in my sinuses. It is not a pleasant buzz! Perfumes give my wife a migraine headache. People should be conservative in their use.
Continued from above.
ReplyDeleteA final tale of traffic justice...one of those rare times when the wise asses get their due. I was driving home from an early morning class down in Pittsburgh's Oakland section back in the early 80s. I was on 5th avenue, which is a 4 lane road, 25 mph, passing though a residential section. There are a lot of busses and pedestrians. It was lightly snowing and the road surface was slick. The traffic is moving but slowly. Along comes a Cadillac Eldorado flying along weaving though the traffic, not only going too fast for conditions but violating the 25 mph speed limit. A few minutes later, a Toyota Celica comes along same thing, driving way too fast for the slippery conditions and the slow moving traffic. I think nothing more of it and continue my slow journey. I crossed the Highland Park Bridge going over the Allegheny River and lo and behold. Ha! Ha! There is one Toyota Celica and one Cadillac Eldorado in a fender bender with both drivers standing shaking there fists at each other. I really wanted to stop and congratulate them. It couldn't have happened to two more deserving individuals.
Oh that has been my fantasy when it happens to me. You see these two cars weaving in and out of traffic and I don't want them to get hurt, but I do wish at times that they would just get into a minor fender bender, just enough to scare them and irritate them like they just scared and irritated me! Is that wrong? Well I guess if my thoughts had the power to make things actually happen it would be wrong, but as it's never happened it's not like I'm going to jinx them!
DeleteThis was great Sextant, truly enjoyed this, especially the line a few comments above about us being kings in our automotive castles! Love it!
"...to make a deposit." Does the bank give you a decent rate for your deposit?
ReplyDeleteHere, on my side of the pond,people have completely lost faith in banks.