h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I know exactly what you mean. What's worse is when you both step from one side to the other several times before managing to get out of sync. Something similar actually happened once when I was trying to hug someone: our arms both went the same way and collided a few times. It was rather embarrassing.

Good point. And when you step side to side a number of times, you think, if I stop, then they will carry on and move to the other side, but they manage to stop at the same time, so you start again, both at the same time, and so one. You could go on forever.

I guess that although you theoretically could go on forever, odds are you'll stop within some reasonable amount of time--just as you could flip a coin and have it come up heads a million times in a row, but the odds are much greater that you'll get tails sometime within the first hundred flips.

True. If things happened in theory, rather than prctice, things could be a lot better. In theory, my cat could not bother me when I'm typing on the computer, in practice, it does exactly this.

And in theory, Communism would be the solution to all the world's problems, and a good solution it would be, too.

But some things in theory would get pretty nasty, like stepping from side to side an infinite number of times.

And so could this conversation, it to could go on forever, but hopefully it will change direction at some point.

Another thing that puzzles me is the ability for cables, flexes and wires, no matter how neatly you coil them up, when you see them ,next, the are all tangled and notted, why does this happen?

I always try to stay on the same side of the sidewalk as I would be if I were driving. So in America, I would walk on the right side of the sidewalk and let people go by on my left. Naturally, if I were in Britain, I would walk on the left. (And probably get confused, as many American motorists do when they drive on British roads.)

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Yes! This makes perfect sense. We (we, as in those in my general area, as I have no other vantage point for comparison) are taught as school-children to walk on the right side of the halls. Then we get older and are taught to drive on the right side of the road. So why are about half the stores in businesses which insist on putting the in and out doors on the side where you need to be on the left to get through? (These exclusive in/out doors tick me off anyway, as well as the ropes at the counters of fast-food joints and banks as they tend to make me feel as if I'm being hearded around like cattle in a slaughterhouse.)

I find it most irritating, when there are escalators in pairs (one goes up, the other down), and there is absolutely no logic in which one goes up (or down ). A good example is the Stockholm central subway station. There are 10+ escalator pairs, some of them have right side traffic, the others left side. Most fun on rush hours

To my way of thinking, given a pair of escalators one should go to the floor above and the other to the floor below. Alas, this is not the case in far too many places.