Dec 16, 2002
How Rude?
There’s a guy walking down the road swigging from a plastic Coke bottle. He’s got one hand on the bottle and the other on his crotch, for reasons I don’t fully understand except that he might also be holding his trousers up – they’re so low-slung and capacious I can see the bottom of his boxer shorts. He takes one last mighty swig from the bottle and then throws it – not even just a quiet drop – off into someone’s front garden.
For a moment, I’m tempted to repeat the action my mother must have done a thousand times when I was a kid.
She’d see someone dropping a crisp packet or can in the street, then she’d pick it up, run over to them (well, trot – mums don’t run, do they?) and say “I think you dropped this.”
The litterbug (one of my first words, I’m proud to state) would be so embarrassed by being presented with their litter by a white-haired little woman (mum went entirely grey by thirty-two – it’s genetic, and I’m heading in that direction too. Well, sometimes, in the wrong light), they’d usually just meekly take it and then pop it in the next bin, when they thought mum wasn’t looking anymore.
I used to have puzzled toddler conversations with her afterwards, tugging on her sleeve:
“He didn’t drop it, he was throwing it away…”
“I know”
“…then why did you pick it up?”
So for a moment, I’m tempted to repeat this procedure with the boy in the low-slung trousers and the bandana, and then I notice that he’s bigger than me, and I’d end up looking like a loony. So I don’t.
Then I’m in the deli, getting lunch, and the new boy is preparing my jacket potato with tuna sweetcorn. He’s young and chatty and laughing with one of the other guys behind the counter, and just as he’d closing the polystyrene case on my spud, Bad Cop (remember her? “What you want, lady?”) spits something at him in Armenian and he rolls his eyes and, using tongs, unloads half the filling from the potato which is now 98% potato and 2% tuna. Not a favourable ratio.
I raise my eyebrows and Bad Cop won’t even meet my glare. I go in there every day and she’s stiffing me. I hope she wisely invests the 0.4p she managed to save by unloading my baked potato.
A South African man with a big floppy quiff is ordering a very complex lunch. He’s got a real physical presence – his chest is puffed up and it feels like he’s taking up too much space. Every time the girl behind the counter checks a bit of the order, he sighs heavily and tolls his eyes at the other customers and confirms in a patronising and snappy tone:
“…you want mayonnaise on the ham bap?”
“[sigh] Yes, I want mayonnaise, that’s what I said, wasn’t it?”
“…and the coronation chicken is on ciabatta?”
“[siiiigh] Yes, ciabatta, I already told you that, for god’s sake”
“…would you like the quiche heated up?”
“[sigh] Well, obviously, yes. Christ almighty.”
How hard is it to be even vaguely courteous? What gives him the right to be such a needle-dick?
There’s this bloke at the counter, paying for his lunch. He’s just ahead of me in the queue – I know this because he made me decide not to have a sandwich today: while deliberating what to have himself, he managed to cough all over the pizza and prod eight baguettes, not to mention getting his head right into the salad bar and breathing. A lot. So I had a potato.
Then after he has paid he walks off, leaving his bottle of water on the counter. So I shout after him “excuse me; you forgot your water!” and he comes back, grabs it and says “I don’t want any water”.
The man behind the counter (Not GoodCop – Penry, the mild mannered janitor) tells him that he was charged for it, and the bloke takes the water and walks away without a word. I shout after him, “you’re welcome!” which sometimes gets me into trouble, but not today, because he’s already gone.
And for the love of all things reasonable, can someone please tell me what the point of flimsy, floppy plastic forks is, if they bend and flex every time you try to get a forkful of baked potato – and then catapult the contents onto your screen or into your hair or across the office? Gah!
