Friday, March 26, 2010

I’ve Been Mugged

Well, sort of. Well, not really. Well, read on …

I was reading an interesting article about the 2-year-old whose mother made no attempt to shut him up during the taxi out to the runway, thus rendering the safety announcements just so much unrecognizable noise. The captain was annoyed enough to turn the plane around and eject the urchin and his mother. They did get an apology and a $300 voucher from the airline, though, so all was not lost for them.

But here’s the thing … people do this kind of thing all the time. Impose. Inject themselves into our lives for no damn reason. They make a lot of noise shouting into their cell phones; they treat the theater like their bloody living rooms; that kind of thing. Can you tell how much they annoy me?

The following excerpt is from that article and it characterizes this behavior as “small muggings” … one of the best descriptions that I have ever heard.

More and more, we're all victims of these many small muggings every day. Our perp doesn't wear a ski mask or carry a gun; he wears Dockers and shouts into his iPhone in the line behind us at Starbucks, streaming his dull life into our brains, never considering for a moment whether our attention belongs to him. These little acts of social thuggery are inconsequential in and of themselves, but they add up -- wearing away at our patience and good nature and making our daily lives feel like one big wrestling smackdown.

I definitely find that people who just have to be in front annoy the shit out of me. Seriously. Have you ever stepped off a plane – exhausted - and walked to customs, only to have several people brushing by you so they can wait 5 less minutes than you? I think Bruce Cockburn says it best … “if I had a rocket launcher, some son of a bitch would die”

By the way, this happened to me last night at about 1:45am after a long, long flight from Jacksonville, FLA with a delay in Chicago … and I was livid that these pricks thought so much of themselves.

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