I know sometimes.. okay, maybe a lot of times... it seems like I'm just boiling over with sheer, unbridled hatred, but that's honestly not the case. More often than not, I'm complaining about things that are, at most, a pain in the ass. Relatively minor inconveniences that really don't matter much that I try to exaggerate for (hopefully comic) effect. But if there's one thing I can say that I truly, truly hate, it's a lack of courtesy fueled by an inflated sense of entitlement. I'm talking about those people who equate freedom with being able to do whatever they want, whenever they want, with absolutely no consideration for how it might impact someone else.
A perfect example of this occurred last Wednesday while I was sitting in a Panera Bread. That's when I Tweeted this photo:
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"This woman simply does not care if you trip and kill yourself" |
In case you can't quite tell, this woman is on her laptop which is plugged into the wall with a cord that she stretched over a chair and across an aisle into an outlet on the wall. Here's a shot of the cord:
After the Tweet, a friend of mine asked, "did you say something to her?". I didn't see the point after stepping carefully over the cord and she smirked at me and said, "sorry!" in that pinched, smarmy, "I'm trying to be cute" way that never, ever is. This wasn't someone who had carelessly created a dangerous situation accidentally and unintentionally by not thinking about it, the kind of mistake to which all of us are prone. This was someone who wanted to sit
there and plug her computer into
that outlet and while
I'm sure I hope she didn't
want anyone to hurt themselves, well, that wasn't really her problem, was it? In other words, she's an aggressively inconsiderate asshole, someone who will go out of their way to create a trip hazard in the middle of a crowded restaurant simply because that's something she wants to do. Why should the health and safety of other people infringe upon that? It flat-out pisses me off because it's not even senseless, it's totally thought-out. She had to have considered the possible consequences and simply chose to ignore them. Who does that? More importantly, why do we need them walking around and using up our water and oxygen when life is already hard and so many of us just want to get through it without losing our minds and in as few pieces as possible?
If I may invoke a scenario that people often use when they talk about the abuse of freedom, I'm pretty sure nobody who stormed the beach at Normandy did so with the idea that they were risking their lives and fighting for one citizen's right to make another plunge face-first into a sourdough bread bowl full of hot broccoli and cheese soup because they didn't want to waste their laptop battery while reading their email (whatever most of those things are, since they weren't invented until well after World War II was over).
I wish I had thought of tripping over it on my way out in a way that would bend the shit out of the prongs on the cord, rendering it useless. "Sorry!"
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