One of my favorite social interactions is when you are about to jaywalk, and you see another pedestrian standing on the other side of the street, waiting to cross. You glance both ways and know that the odds are in your favor that if you go now, you won't get smoked by a transport truck. You make eye contact with the person on the other side. Their face, once wraught with trepidation changes as you cross toward them - ah fuck it, their new expression says. They jaywalk too. You both arrive on your respective desired sides of the street, safe and feeling all the braver for your boldness.
On the flip side, a behavior I distinctly dislike is this: You find yourself standing at a busy intersection with another person. The walk sign says "go forth lovely pedestrians", and you begin to walk at a normal pace across the street. The stranger beside you SCURRIES across, as though that previously mentioned transport truck is 99.9% surely going to smash right into them if they do not get to the other side before the little hand of the walk-sign begins to blink. Newsflash: if the lights facing the on-coming traffic are red, then that truck isn't allowed to come at you guns blazing. The little hand on the walk sign is an eager little bugger, this is true, but unless you are the slowest walker in the world*, then I'm sure you'll make it across just fine. When people run across like demented squirrels, it makes those among us who walk at a normal pace look like we're willingly getting in the way of the people idling in their cars (even though we all know they'd have to stay that way even if no one was crossing the street).
*I'm looking at you young couple holding hands taking up the entirely of the sidewalk walking so slowing I am confident that you never actually lifted your feet off the ground once - rather choosing to demonstrate to the world how an extremely irritating zombie couple would shuffle down the street.
No comments:
Post a Comment