start a victory garden and ration your IRRATIONALLY ANGRY feelings, part 3

gonna sound like a cranky old here but am i wrong that people are just less aware than they used to be of the people around them? like i remember there was a time i could go a whole week (month?) without someone walking right into me, having to tell someone to step out of a shop's entryway so i can get by, etc.

definitely!!

that is why i grocery shop at 8 am on saturdays. can't stand people's lack of body consciousness in the grocery store.

but it's also on the sidewalk, on the subway platform, at a concert venue, anywhere people gather. everyone's so self-absorbed and there's no spatial awareness! i'm also finding an increase in vehicles that *almost* run me over -- stopping for pedestrians is kind of an afterthought.

Ha holy shit I was going to post the same thing. People just not looking where they're going, standing in the middle of the sidewalk, gah.

Certainly gets worse in this town as the tourist season comes into play.
Plus you get annoying buskers causing bottlenecks on the main street which tends to be a pain. I don't mind non annoying buskers but christ when you can't get down a major street without having to negotiate your way around already not very attentive people being distracted by the spectacle that they're walking past the crowd standing around it just becomes tortuous . & then you get the busker themselves giving out if you walk across the empty space they see as their stage.

But it happens every year around this time so all these threads have something about it around this time. Not really avoidable.
Actually noticed taht one possible detour around the thing seems to have been stopped. There's a branch of a national department shop that's part of the local shopping centre and it now has a big sign up on one set of windows saying please se other entrance. & that route taht now seems to have been stopped was the easiest way around the blockage. I noticed taht there seemed to be s growing maze between the doors there and the other entrance which I was wondering might have been a reaction to shop lifters being able to get through easily.

I've been getting more and more grumpy that you can't go anywhere without an assault on your hearing. Walking through town - accordian busking in underpass, some teenage combo doing open mic stuff in the centre between all the shops, department store having some 'promo event' over the PA playing Blurred Lines, etc etc
This may be related to wheeling a sleeping baby around town and/or having to give up on conversation with my partially deaf husband but ffs can we just not have some peace and quiet somewhere?

ia: i read something today that basically said "i love how pretty and dainty feminine handwriting is; men write so sloppily." i have shitty handwriting, so thanks for calling me "unfeminine"! but i'm not just calling this one guy out -- every time you go "men are like this, women are like that," you're essentially calling women who aren't "like that" not-women, making them feel invisible or deformed in some way.

to illustrate gb's point in the extreme

car stopped in the middle of parking lot throughway, young woman with 3 small children (1 in a stroller) standing at driver's window literally doing a haul (ie showing what she bought) to whoever was driving

i waited, and when it got ridiculous i tapped the horn

she blanked me and kept right on doing what she was doing! like i was being rude or annoying WHUT EVEN

someone else walked over to her, grabbed the kids & basically told her they had to go, and she went back to her car...and then the car that she had been talking to pulled in next to her. COULDNT YOU HAVE DONE THAT FIRST

jfc

it's like when i read an article saying "here's what women writers/musicians bring to the table that men don't" and it's not just about women's own experiences but asserting that the compositional structure or playing style of women is fundamentally *different* from what men do -- it's reaffirming stereotypes and erasing women who don't conform to the writer's assumptions. sometimes the response to that will be "well, you're just trying to be a MAN and that's not very feminist, is it?" oy, gender politics.

xp

there is a pedestrian walkway in my city, with flashing lights on either side of the street and a brightly painted crosswalk, that drivers apparently pay no attention to as it has no stop sign

very tempted to take the afternoon off work some day and wait for cars to approach, walk directly in front, and then shake my fist and stab my finger toward the blinking signs if they give me any shit

where i live, any intersection is a potential crosswalk whether it's marked or not. this is not an obscure law. it's on the exam you take to get your license. you are not a jaywalker if you deign to cross the street at an intersection; that is your legal right. but drivers do not give a shit and will not stop for you if they see you waiting to cross.

very tempted to take the afternoon off work some day and wait for cars to approach, walk directly in front, and then shake my fist and stab my finger toward the blinking signs if they give me any shit

Me irl every weekday trying to cross from the bus stop to my house except without the flashing lights, despite my numerous communications with our alderperson requesting some more robust signage.

Actually I haven't emailed him in awhile. I should drop him a line.

apologies for the corporate newspaper link, but there's a video here: http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/local/des-moines/2015/06/19/east-village-business-owners-raygun-crosswalk-des-moines-changes/28980605/

very tempted to take the afternoon off work some day and wait for cars to approach, walk directly in front, and then shake my fist and stab my finger toward the blinking signs if they give me any shit

As carl mentioned, our lives.

oddly enough, there's a walkway with *stop light* that is triggered by a pedestrian button near my own home. its between a strip of businesses and school grounds across the street, so sometime in the past someone must have lobbied for it.

Earlier this month a "concerned citizen" — Draper's words, while some business owners said it was him — placed a vertical sign that read "state law yield for pedestrians" along the yellow center lane in the crosswalk.

City officials removed the sign the same day.

"We saw people stopping (at the sign) even when there wasn't a pedestrian there. They didn't know what to do," McCoy said.

What, like this one?

http://i.imgur.com/0vt8I5r.jpg

a real sign? whoa now, that's going too far

We have those signs. Since 2011 it is law that in Chicago that you must stop, not yield to pedestrians in crosswalks. This is what happens to the signs. https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5342/17445335154_a08e7e717e_z_d.jpg pretty much pointless.

We have those signs in my town. the last vehicle that ignored it (and me!!) was a school bus.

My favorite thing involving people with no concept of their surroundings is when someone is looking at you and still walking straight into you.

We have those in my town, too; people just move 'em out of the center of the road and drive straight through. So I just start crossing the street wherever I fucking feel like, as long as I think there's enough time/space between me and the next approaching vehicle, and death-glare them right through the windshield so they slow down. I'm not dead yet, so it's working.

OTM. Hate standing drinkers when the bar isn't full (OK, I hate them when it is full too, but at least then they have an excuse) in general: blocking the bar, blocking the route to the toilets, standing right behind my chair talking loudly and swinging their drinking elbow an inch away from my head. Sometimes complete strangers even rest the other arm on the back of my chair and that makes me wish a painful death upon everyone. I have personal space issues

I can relate to your personal space issues. My main issue is, I like to eat at the bar alone. When I'm eating at the bar, please leave me the fuck alone; don't touch me. You may think it means nothing to bump me slightly when you're passing behind me, but the truth is, if I'm getting bumped 30 times in a row when I'm trying to eat, whether by a customer or by the staff, I'm going to go insane. Why can't people ATTEMPT to pass by me without jostling me? Is that not possible? I'm not just having a drink at at the bar, I'm eating - eating is different from just having a drink, no? Would you just willy-nilly bump into someone who's eating dinner at a table? Of course not. So don't bump into me, step the fuck back.

Stab every passing person with your fork at thigh level.

Problem solved, thanks. A little blood will fix this, I'm sure. Maybe I should wear a spiked belt..

I have pointy elbows and employ them readily in situs like this!

spiked gauntlets

There's a clothes shop in SF where no matter where you stand browsing, the staff would need to 'just squeeze past' about once every 2 minutes. It made me sooo ia.

Can't believe I missed all the discussion of people's lack of spatial awareness, as that's the perpetual peak of my IA mountain. I've said for years that schools are going to have to start teaching classes on proxemics. The CTA seems to have taken steps in that very direction, with new signage on the buses and trains that are basically just How To Be A Person Around Other People 101. I know I've said it here before (and maybe in this thread, even) but we're moving towards a time where a larger number of oblivious and unperturbed people are going to be navigating space like Roombas while a remaining handful of us will be impotently IA over the degredation of society. Whattayagonnado.

We just need personal proximity alarms. Problem solved. Except then we'll have a noise problem. Maybe proximity alarms on vibrate.

There's a walkway/jetty thing that runs along the canal from Kings Cross to Camden with big 'no cycling' signs all the way along it. One day I'm going to push a cyclist in.

xpost Orrrr maybe involving shock collars? Just spitballing here.

IA: when you can smell someone having a bbq in their garden and you aren't going to it and you can't have one and all you're having for dinner that evening is stupid spaghetti
Makes me really cross

LOL our neighbors are grilling maniacs so that is p much every fine evening from May to October.

sorry everyone :D

Oh I bet I've said this before but it gets me every time:

When I hold the door open for somebody coming behind me and instead of taking the door in hand so I can move on, then move past me as though my intent was to stand there and wave them through like a doorman.

This is particularly endemic in this narrow doorway between the lobby of my office building and the back door of a Walgreens. To go through without touching the door, you have to shift your body to kind of sidle around the person holding the door, so there's no failure of understanding of how this is supposed to work. These are people who are going out of their way to not touch the door that I'm only holding open for them as a courtesy. I've actually let the door swing back on people before because I'm an asshole who values the social contract above the health of the nose/forehead of the person behind me.

Ohhhh, yeah, I've only had that experience a couple of times but it's the worst.

I'm getting progressively worse at restraining my more impatient instincts in the face of people's lack of consideration. The other day, this girl stopped immediately after walking through the turnstile at the train station to take a selfie, and before I even realized I was doing it, I said, "where do you think you are right now?" And it's not like these people are going to feel the amount of shame that my chastisement is meant to induce. Far more likely is that I shoot my mouth off to the wrong person and get tossed down a flight of stairs. Such is the plight of the righteous, I suppose.

Or they post a FB/twitter update about the asshole who yelled at them for doing something totally okay and innocent.

I have often snapped, "LOOK UP WHEN YOU ARE WALKING" at people and I will continue to do so until I, too, and tossed down the stairs.

The people two-abreast with little wheelie cases, who stop in the middle of the interchange between Tube lines in my nearest station, or in the passage to the platform containing the freshly arrived train I need to catch. WELCOME TO LONDON, FUCKWITS. NOW, MOVE!

When people glued to their phones are walking towards me, I more or less stop, and certainly dont move out of the way, willing them to walk into me.

Sadly thus far they never have. I want to be able to say "Oh I'm sorry, you weren't watching where you were going!"

that makes you sound like one of those dr suess zax characters.

What's really ben bugging me for the last couple fo weeks is facebook suddenly jumping off what I'm in the middle of reading or writing because a new message has been added to my feed. I don't remember that always happening and think its only been recently that it's started but it is really annoying.
IS it a Mozilla Firefox thing?

I just thought there was more stability on what you were actively engaged with. But people have been complaining about Facebook design for ages anyway.

I've got this work doc of promos in Google Drive. One of them is about the big money part of our state and the header is The Specific Northwest.

And Google Docs will NOT stop trying to correct Specific to Pacific. Look, Google, I know it's an idiot pun, but LEAVE IT ALONE.

lol

A former coworker used to say "pacific" instead of "specific." She used to write it, too. Your spreadsheet would confuse her terribly.

Did you ask her to pacify what she was talking about?

No I tried not to talk to her too much. It always left me confused and a little headachy.

She's the one who would use "vice" instead of "versus" as in "We need to decide whether to have the meeting in the conference room vice the break room." Which was obviously a corruption of "vice versa" but until I figured out wtf she meant, deciphering her emails was challenging.

She had a whole slew of linguistic idiosyncrasies.

people who make physical contact with you or stand in such a way that they're sweaty arm is on you, when public transport is not full enough for this to be unavoidable