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

Each time I think I've discovered the limit of how incredibly lazy people in this town are, they amaze me once more

There are two dumpsters near our apartment, both of which have a sloping top and two half-lids which can be lifted up to drop rubbish in. Normally both lids are lifted up all the way and are hanging over the back of the dumpster so you can simply toss a bag of rubbish in.

I went out there this morning to do just that and found one hell of a mess. The dumpsters were emptied on... I guess Friday morning by a truck which has two great big forks on the front. The forks slide into slots on the side of the dumpster which is then lifted up over the cab of the truck and emptied into the back. As the dumpster comes back down in a big arc, the lids swing back into the closed position.

There have been a few occasions when I've gone to the dumpster and found that someone has opened the lids on one of them and hung them down the back, and that one has filled to the brim whilst the other one has remained closed and empty. What I saw this morning though took my breath away. One of the dumpsters had both lids shut, the other had one shut and one open. People had continued to fling bags of rubbish into that one even thoug it was overflowing on the open side and virtually empty on the closed side. The other (completely closed dumpster was utterly empty of any rubbish. As a result of bags falling onto the ground around the dumpster, the raccoons had got into them and strewn crap all over the place.

I got a number of questions which all boil down to one ultimate question (no, not that one ) - what goes through people's heads when they do stuff like that?

1) Why can't you be bothered to lift the lid on the dumpster?
2) Can't you see that it's full?
3) Of course you can, so why do you throw the rubbish on there anyway?
4) Can't you see that the bag of rubbish you just tossed on top of it fell onto the ground?
5) Don't you know that the wildlife is going to scatter it all over the place?

After all, it is their own home these people are messing up

Some answers (??) to the questions Gosho asked.

1. <>
Because Al Qaeda is hiding in the dumpster, and they know
where I live.

2) <>
But it's *not* full. As long as nothing falls off, it can
be stacked six miles high if necessary.

3) <>
Because I'm in a hurry, and someone will clean up after me,
as they always do.


4) <>
No, it didn't. That was just a mirage. Everything will be fine,
don't sweat the small stuff.

5) <>
Bless the precious wildlife, I am so happy to know I'm helping to feed them my stale cheese puffs and white bread crusts.

(The dumpster near where I live is pretty awful, too.

These are the same people who:

- Line up at coffee shops, ATMs, ticket booths, etc., in a straight line even though the line 1) completely blocks a sidewalk, corridor, entranceway, escalator and/or necessitated piling up into each other against a wall or door.... instead of making the line do a 90 degree DOWN the corridor, around the escalator... etc.

- Look at one as if one is a) insane because one actually wants to use the sidewalk, corridor, entranceway, escalator they are currently blocking and/or b) fully intend to steal their spot even if you have just finished using the coffee shops, ATMs, ticket booths, sidewalk, corridor, entranceway, escalator, etc.

- Stand right in front of the person who has sensibly formed a 90 degree angle in the line so as not to block said sidewalk, corridor, entranceway, escalator, etc....

- Pretend the other 600 people in a line are standing there for their health, the sale of Beatles reunion tickets, no particular reason; step behind the person currently using the ATM, coffee shop counter, ticket booth and then act "surprised" when their attention is called to the line of 600 people and say a) "Oh, are you in line?" b) "I didn't see you there." or c) "I don't have time to wait. I am in a hurry."

I am pretty sure I would *not* wait behind 600
other people for some of those things. Coffee shop?
There's a Dunkin Donuts every half mile in my area.
One is busy? go to the next one. ATM's? There are
others further down the road. Ticket booths, on the
other hand, are usually the only ones where you can
get your tickets. For them, I would have to wait
in line.

When you are trying to get off an escalator the base of which is blocked my a line of people waiting their turn at Timmy's, you'd understand.

By the way... why, precicely, do people who have just descended an escalator, stop right at the bottom to have a discussion, completely ignoring the crowd of people behind them?????

Yes, and what about people who walk out of the supermarket door and stop dead, looking for their car / spouse / child / the weather / the stars and cause a pile-up of trolleys behind them; then have the gall to look annoyed when you ask them to move?

Not that people like that irritate me at all, you understand?


F/b

People who, while in the supermarket, let their children drive the trolly (ie; ram the trolley into the legs of people ahead of them and play racecars down the aisles), leave the trolley in the centre of the aisle and stand beside it while 1) talking to a friend about something other than anything remotely shopping-related, 2) determining the fat-content of 16 different types of soda crackers (altright... you are 6 feet tall and 92 1/2 pounds.... you could USE a little fat); walk at a snails pace down the aisle while aiming their trolley from side-to-side and ignoring you when you say "Excuse me" increasingly louder until you are practically yelling at them.... and then complaining because you "yelled" at them; parking their trolly a) right in front of the beef section of the meat cooler while viewing the chicken, three meat-types away, or b) parking their trolley in the middle of the aisle, at an angle and then glaring at you when you have the audacity of moving their trolley so that you can get by; standing at the deli counter monopolising the one clerk while trying to decide if they was 100 grams of the shaved ham at $1.29 a lb, 98 grams of the sliced ham at $1.30 a lb., ("which would be cheaper?") before deciding that it was turkey breast they wanted which will necessitate the clerk having to go into the back to open a brand-new package of turkey breast..... and then become impatient because they are "in a hurry"... meanwhile the 15 other people behind them can all just "get a life".

These are the same people who get ticked off when they came in 10 minutes to closing, spent 15 minutes browsing, start huffing and puffing because the clerk is "slow" and they are "in a hurry", and then insist on writing a cheque for the three items they bought, with cash back.... and then get bent out of shape because they are a "regular customer" so why should they have to be bothered having to show ID? (because they have been in the store 3 times in as many years, you can imagine the stink they would cause if someone had forged a cheque on their account.)

I have a friend who really doesn't care for people who get off an escalator and then stand there. She's also a shotokan karate black belt

I haven't encountered the escalator problems that you
describe, but there are a lot people who stop just after
they get through the supermarket door.

Don't get me started on the stupid things people do on and with escalators......

Oh go on ... you know you want to ...

http://www.kovr13.com/02feb00/020400a.htm
http://barelybad.com/cl_rickytaylor.htm
http://www.mainichi.co.jp/english/news/archive/200001/03/news08.html

"There is a modern-day version of this tale: shopping at a posh department store a woman was trailing a bit of her pashmina shawl and it got caught in the escalator. Ignoring the pleas of those around her to just let the escalator eat the damn thing up, she stubbornly tugged and tried to cajole the shawl out of the metal teeth. She was on her hands and knees, screaming for someone to turn off the escalator rather than sacrifice her stylish wrap. Finally a store manager raced over and yanked the shawl so hard it tore in half, leaving our style maven unscathed. Another moment and her perfect patrician nose would have been mangled by the escalator teeth. The hero received no thanks, just a barrage of beratement and a demand that he replace her precious pashmina tout de suite." http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sfmetro/04.17.00/style-0014.html


http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n05/camp01_.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/facts/metro120598.htm

...... and that is just skimming.....

In New York City, I was in a mall when a child strangled on an escalator. He was roughhousing with his brother, fell over, and the string from his jacket caught in the teeth. Even though the escalator had been stopped by someone at the top, by the time they were able to get the jacket cut free, he was dead.

With that in my mind, I have always been careful on escalators.

I worked in a store where there was an escalator and many, many small children. Children love to play on escalators and parents simply will not see that an escalator is a dangerous piece of machinery.

I still get chills when I think of how horrifyingly close several children came to having digits or limbs mangled. I personally saw far too many near tragic acccidents and when parents were informed they often berated me for chastising either them or their children.

My usual response was "So, you would prefer having a child having their arm ripped off or their foot mangled beyond repair than having me injure their delicate feelings. Frankly, I think the police would see it in a very different light." That USUALLY shut them up. I made no apologies.

The original store manager, so obtusely afraid of "offending" people tried to tell me that it was store policy not to tell them not to play on the escalator. I told him about seeing the child killed on the escalator and he changed his tune.

There was the child who started screaming at me for yanking his hand out of the little slot into which the handrail disappears..... and his mother, in turn, started screaming at me. I shut her up with a few home truths of what could have happened to her son.

The child who nearly decapitated himself when he started yanking on the handrail and it "grabbed", flipped two feet in the air and hit him in the face.

The child whose mother was not holding him by the hand and not watching him when he fell forward onto the step. As they rose near the top, she reached down, still not actually looking at him, and yanked him up, just as his little fingers hit the comb at the top. He started crying and looking at the fingers of his right hand. He came so close as to have his little fingers were actually pinched. She never knew that less than a split second later, he would (and I mean WOULD) have been pulled into the teeth of the comb. My manager and I were at the top of the escalator with a barrier between us and them.... had something happened, we certainly would not have reached them in time to stop the escalator. The two of us were so upset we had to leave the floor.

Blimey! And there was me thinking that the worst that could happen to you on an escalator would be to get a sharp shove in the back if one dared to stand on the left.

I'll never look at escalators the same again. I have to go up one today - ooh errrr.

Seriously though, it does show just how many people are frightened to interfere - even if it means saving somebody from injury or worse. Why are we like this?

And why do parents (in particular, but not wanting to be sweeping about this) feel that an intervention to save little Molly from decapitation is a bad thing? Do they run the risk of being a 'failure' for not realising the danger themselves, or is it simply shock once they realise just how dangerous the situation had become?

F/b

Some people just don't like to be helped... I was walking along Green Lanes last night and there was a Ford Escort driving with a flat tyre, and it looked like it was about to disintegrate and come off the rim completely. So I waved and gestured a bit to try and get the guy's attention, and he wound the window down and started shouting at me, starting along the lines of "Do you seriously believe I didn't know?" and veering towards the realm of personal abuse.

Well, admittedly it was kind of obvious, but he *might* not have known quite how bad the situation was, and if he was going to carry on like that he was going to seriously ing up his car. Frankly, I hope he did.

Normally I'd have just shouted back something like "Well, 'scuse me for trying to do a bloke a favour", but I'd just come back from having something painful done at the hospital and I was feeling pretty weak, so I just slunk off with my tail between my legs. It put me on a downer for the rest of the evening.

I think there's a deeply-imbedded tendency to scapegoat
and blame somebody (anybody) else for the bad things
that happen to us. It usually happens when we're under stress
(is there any parent of a two-year-old who is *not*
under stress?), and our minds can't handle the complexity
of a situation. People who are under chronic, longterm
stress, learn to scapegoat as a reflex.

If something bad was done to your psyche when you were a
child, your psychiatrist will not dissuade you from
blaming it on your mother or father, or both. They're
either dead, or in therapy themselves (for which they
are blaming their *own* parents or, maybe you, never
themselves).

"We have met the enemy, and he is us" is probably quite
true, but not many people will admit it to themselves
when the hits the fan.