I'm never gonna write you a letter, never gonna call you on the phone

Follow up to last post.


Eyn - if somebody does that to you they probably aren't paying close attention to the transaction at hand. If they pay with credit card, fake like the credit card got rejected. Better, let the transaction go through but "accidentally" leave their credit card on top of something magnetic (they won't find out until they try to buy something somewhere else). If they pay cash, reserve $1 tip their change as a friendly tip to yourself.

Me - The problem, Eyn, is that I try to live my life by a fairly strict moral code - generally if my mother found out I did it and would hit me with a soup ladle or a whisk, then I try not to do it.

Stealing and wiping credit cards would, likely, get me beaten. I used to work at just being overly polite, but they don't notice. So I now I peddle from the supposed moral high ground. I don't know if it's working, but it makes me feel better and I like to think they'll be so angry they'll think about it a lot and eventually reform and teach their children that talking on cellphones in places of business is gauche and tacky and terribly un-American.

Eyn - I respect that, but you're looking at a lifetime of being a doormat. IMO the Golden Rule should read allow for retaliatory strikes...

Old version: "Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you"
New version: "Do unto others as they do unto you"

Me - I hardly consider it life as a doormat - I'm striving against the new status quo of civility in modern society, not taking whippings from the town bully.

The very thing that galls me is that most people don't seem aware that there is anything rude about it - this has much, I believe, to do with the dissolution of the American family structure, i.e. the trend over the last 2 or 3 decades of completing one's education and then moving as far away from their parents/grandparents as physically possible - we are seeing, now, the 20-something offspring of the first people who didn't have their parents around to help them raise their children, and it was these same people who were first able to afford the luxury (now faux-necessity) of the cellular phone. Without the rather more brusque nature of familial governing to tell people what is what, a new culture arose with the cellphone, where no one was ever around to tell anyone else what was and was not proper use.

Figure that 'polite' society rarely speaks out when a mother slaps her child in public, when people argue violently in the streets, when people get dangerously drunk in public - it's terribly improper to ever mention anyone doing anything unseemly to their face. Further, the evolution of the retail community is such that cashiers and clerks stand only to suffer for ever speaking up when someone is being actively rude to them, let alone some so banal as simply failing to recognize them or being 'impolite'. I think most people are terrified of being seen to act or speak out of turn, so the larger number go on chatting and ignoring the world around them, being awfully imposing on other peoples quiet without ever suffering even a questioning remark, let alone some form of rebuke.

This is all aside from the eerie precedent set wherein no one ever chances to meet a stranger on the street or in a shop, because they are always focused entirely on the voice of someone else who is similarly walking around a shop or a store - and it rarely seems the sharing of important information, it's often just....describing what is happening right that minute. There is a concern I have that his says a lot about where we are as a nation - very scared, very concerned with being and of appearing to be alone or unimportant.

I said before that I tend to rudder myself by asking what my mother would think of what I was doing - if my momma saw me walk up to a cashier in the midst of a cellphone conversation and fail to acknowledge that person or inquire after their well-being because of it? Beating. Not a hickory switch or anything, maybe a shoe upside the head. Because she would be disappointed. It should be noted that my mother walloped me but one time - and I yelled at her for it - when I was small, but it was quite enough for her to tell me what was what about whatever it was I did. I am lucky for that sort of parenting. What shocks me is that these people I encounter, their parents never gave them that rudder, obviously never stopped to tell them what could be construed as being uncivil - and while someone might think it brash of me to think so, thus it falls to me to affect small changes in the community around me.

Causing people harm, fiscal or otherwise, wont stop them from being rude - it will simply mean that they grow angry at the next shop they go to and start being flustered with some other poor clerk who can't tell the person why their card doesnt work, half because they dont know and half because that person is still on the phone, ranting to their friend about 'how ridiculous' this is and not really being aware enough to comprehend. The cellphone has left so many people detached from the world around them, sowing more grief and confusion into that...it appeals to a certain highschool sensibility of revenge, but it wouldn't help anybody. Certainly not if they have no idea why it is that harm is being levered upon them - better the slim chance that someone might take a look at themselves in a different light, or think twice about doing the same thing again; in this case, being more conscious of talking on cellphones in neighborhood shops because at least one guy asked them if they thought they were being rude, in a fashion that implied quite distinctly that they were. I am well within my liberties to throw people out of the store for, really, any old thing I like - but again, tossing someone out and saying 'because you were on your phone' is not as delicate a mechanism as pausing them, asking them a question and then telling them to have a good night and take care of themselves.

I am fairly confident it is the first time that girl had even thought of it and the whole point is to make people think.

So no, I don't see it as 'door mat'ish behavior - rather a series of small actions taken against a problem of unfortunate size.