My wife and I took our daughter to one of those chain pizza shops geared toward younger kids, complete with video arcade, ball pits, etc. Although kids pumped up on caffeine, pizza and video games can be occasionally rude, I’m continually amazed at how well young kids thrown together like that get along. Some of the adults, however, I could do without.
The place was very crowded and people swiped my booth not once but twice. The first time I left my jacket in my seat as an indicator that the booth was taken while my wife went to order pizza and I wandered off to try to track down my daughter. When I returned somebody was sitting else was sitting in my booth. I let them slide because they were sitting on the other side of the booth from where I had left my jacket and they were very apologetic (though come on — in a crowded restaurant with kids you have to do more than a casual scan.)
Determined not to let this sort of ambiguity in temporary property rights over our booth happen again, I took my jacket and sprawled it over the table — there’s no way anyone could miss it. Again, my wife was stuck in the slowest pizza line in the world and my daughter was doing something that looked rather dangerous at the time so I vaulted across the place to explain to her about the safe way to play.
When I return there is a family of about six sitting in our booth. They had taken my jacket, scrunched it all up, and set it on the no man’s land dividing the booth from the one next to it. My wife would have probably had some choice words for those folks, but I’m pretty much flabbergasted when I run into such bizarre levels of rudeness — I just gave them The Glare while snatching my jacket and found another booth.
Unfortunately I see such routine rudeness on a regular basis. As I’ve mentioned before, I work at a university and one of the things I’m dismayed at is the complete lack of manners and respect for others that a significant minority of students, professors and administrators have. A few weeks ago at the McDonald’s inside the student union, a mid-level manager simply cut in front of about 50 people (and either didn’t hear or chose to ignore the vulgar mutterings from those in line). Another time I saw a woman in her late 20s get in a shouting match with one of the McDonald’s register folks — her son had tried to cut to the front of a line about 12 people and the person behind the register politely but firmly explained this was rude behavior which just set the mother off.
The other day I was in line behind a professor in a cafeteria who ended up being very mean to a new Malaysian trainee who was moving a bit too slow and had difficulty understanding the professor’s requests.
Is it really asking too much for such people to be a little less impatient and a little more polite?