A New Weekly Feature: Annoying People!

In my ongoing effort to expand my reader base and increase the amount of feedback I am receiving--thank you to the 2 people who have left comments, you know who you are--I am going to try and start a new weekly column titled: Annoying People.

  As those of you reading continue to get to know me you'll come to learn one thing, I'm not much of a people person.  Maybe that's why I sit here on my couch using the internet to communicate rather than being out cavorting with real people.  But I do not think that you necessarily have to be a people person to still be annoyed by stupid people.

This week's annoyance; the lady in front of you at the checkout line that for some reason must empty everything out of her purse in order to pay for her groceries and then hold you up while she, rather than move out of the line, stands at the counter and rearranges everything as she puts it back into her purse.

Tina and I encountered one of these a few weeks ago at Target.  The funny thing was that Tina ended up having a spat with the cashier because of the woman in front of us.  You see, it was one of those trips T and I made where we only needed a couple of items so it didn't take very long for the cashier to ring our things up.  The problem was that I couldn't get to the little card swiper thing because the woman in front of us, and her cart, were still right there.  She had apparently needed to empty the contents of her purse completely in order to pay for her purchases and was now putting them back into her purse in painstakingly slow fashion.

This is when the cashier said to me (I'm paraphrasing here), "Sir, you need to move up to pay for your things." 

That didn't make Tina too happy and she snaps back something like, "Its kind of hard for him to do that with that lady still there."

Now the lady hears this and suddenly feels bad.  "Oh, I'm sorry." She says as she suddenly discovers how to put the stuff into her purse quickly and moves along.

Now the cashier starts apologizing to Tina, who is in no mood to hear it.  She thought the cashier should have been directing her comments to the slowpoke, not me.  I was pissed at the slowpoke for being so clueless and self involved.  So now everyone is pissed except for the lady who caused everything in the first place.  She just moved her self involved person right along.

Therein lies the problem.  We've become a self involved society.  Over at Working Girl's blog--one of the best blogs going, IMO--she had a post earlier in the week in which she questions whether chivalry is dead.  She makes some good points and in some cases I think she may be right.  But I do not think that every jerk that doesn't open a door or hold an elevator for a woman is unchivalrous.  What has happened is that all of the Blackberries, Bluetooth gadgets, Wifi hotspots and other tools that make us accessible 24/7, no matter where we are at, have over inflated our sense of self importance to the point that we make ourselves oblivious to our surroundings and the needs of others.  The result, in a nutshell, is the loss of common courtesy.

WOW!  What a diatribe.  I guess I am so self involved that I think that you guys have nothing to do other than peruse my ramblings.  I hope they were entertaining.