I am starting (again) to get cranked-out by people being utterly unaware of the fact that what they are doing–or NOT doing–is affecting other people, and not in a good way. In short, people are starting to bug me. Imagine that!
Now, I am not, in any way, shape or form, implying that I never do this sort of thing myself. Mercy, no ! There are WAY too many witnesses…and squealers. However, small aggravations in public places are starting to get to me and some days it’s all I can do to keep my mouth shut; on the other hand, some days, it’s a darn good thing that I do (and remarkable too).
For instance, about shopping carts… Most stores which have shopping carts have places to which they would like them returned. Aldi’s has got the take on this: to get a cart, you have to put a quarter in a locking device, you go do your shopping and when you return with items in the cart, you place them in your car, then return the cart, fasten the locking device to the cart and you get your quarter back. Simple. Seldom does one see errant shopping carts around the Aldi’s parking lot. Not NEVER, seldom–some people apparently decide that a quarter is not worth their time, or their time is not worth a quarter…whatever. These people do not get to be rich and/or famous, I’ll bet.
Anyway, other parking lots do not fare as well. People go off and leave carts all higgledy-piggledy, every which way, in the designated cart spaces and in some parking spaces or in front of them or at the side or, sometimes in the reserved handicapped spaces. What, these folks are so important that they cannot take their valuable time to put the carts where they belong, or to keep the abandoned carts from surprising the next driver who wants to pull into what should be an open space? They figure that having somebody else’s car get dinged by a renegade, out-of-place cart is “no skin off their nose” , so to speak. The people whose cars are scratched & dented probably don’t think so.
And another thing, these persons who go off and leave their carts all alone in the lot will frequently justify their behavior by saying, “Oh they have people to do that.” Indeed “they” do, and those people wish to be paid to round up and return the carts. This results in an expense to be figured into the operation of the business establishment and may well be a reason why prices rise to cover that expense. What a revelation! And it applies everywhere that slovenly behavior (with actual vandalism being the tippy-top of that) affects the public spaces that we all find ourselves in. Somebody has to clean up and get things back into shape for the next round of customers or the general public. Cleaning and repairs are not necessarily cheap, so it would behoove us all to be a little more responsible in the first place–even return a cart that’s not yours, perhaps, straighten the carts in the corral so that they’re not sticking out into the car lanes, so that the individuals who are actually coming out to do all this can do their jobs. What a concept!
And another thing…. I’m coming up to the self-check-out area of one of the BIG stores–which was, naturally, pretty busy, since it was Saturday–where there was a woman with a piled-high cart, sort of across between two lanes, looking like she was heading for the one right- hand one with a less-loaded cart in front of her (check-out strategy kicks in), so I went for the other one. Well, turns out that the left-hand lane(that I was in) actually moved faster, so this woman started bad-mouthing me to a companion shopper there with her. Not real loud, of course, but definitely loud enough that I was supposed to hear what she had to say about how I cut in line and how I had my nerve being so rude as to do such a thing. Made me laugh, actually, and the companion looked a tad concerned that I might take offense (that surely was what was intended) and we might proceed to “duke it out” right there. Coulda been a major fracas, with me swinging a box of cat litter and some muffins to counter her BBQ chicken and bags of snacks, but I just asked if she really wanted to be in the left-hand lane and moved over. Karma then kicked in and the new line turned out to be faster than either of us had estimated and I got out of there in just a few minutes. She was still complaining as she scanned her stuff and I got out of there. Luckily, neither one of us had a weapon; at least I didn’t. The Tidy Cats might have been kind of deadly though. At home, used, I’d swear to it.
