If you're ever in a crowd situation with me (as opposed to just "in a crowd", a "crowd situation" is one of those instances in which you are both "in a crowd" and there is a high likelihood of a "situation" occuring), you'll know that I don't deal with these normal everyday life events well. The reason for this is my unfortunate lack of positive interactions with strangers. This morning, I was on the train on the way into work, working on a product roadmap document (the guy next to me was looking over my shoulder....damn! now he knows that task 22a was "create use case scenarios"!). The train stopped, and a woman about 40 years old with a metal cane got on the train and rushed to the last open seat, the one behind me. Even though I was heads-down in my work, I know this about the woman with the cane because when she sat down behind me, she whacked me on the head, squarely, with her metal cane. I turned around to see why somebody had just bonked me in the head with metal tubing and came face-to-face with a woman breathing heavily. She just looked at me and said "I can't walk without it!". The man sitting next to me then looked up from his paper and peered at me with a "being mean to the handicapped lady again, jerk?" look on his face. Don't ask me how i know that was the look on his face, but it was. I wanted to tell him that she had cranked me on the head with her cane in her panic to get the seat but it was evident that this gentleman was not going to listen to my side of the story.
To make matters worse, the woman behind me was seated next to somebody who had just finished reading a book i'm about to start, titled "Devil in the White City". Wouldn't you know it, the cane lady had just finished the book and proceeded to tell the person next to her that she didn't like the ending. Great. Now when i read this book, the entire time I'm reading it, I will be thinking, "i wonder if this ends as badly as cane lady says, or is she just a giant idiot who strolls about town misunderstanding literature and wholloping folks in the noggin?". One thing's for sure: the end of the book is now ruined either way. Damn you, cane lady!
Posted by Dick at October 25, 2004 12:10 PM | TrackBack