Random Acts of Weirdness (Pet Peeve Unit)

It was a week of random weirdness (and rudeness) out there in the big city. Here are some examples:

—The other day I went out to get lunch and drop off a bill at the mailbox. (Yes, I still pay one or two of my bills by check, but only because the companies in question don't offer an appropriate online payment method. In this case it's National Grid, our electric company. The only way you can pay online is to set up a recurring monthly payment, and I choose not to do this because I like to retain control over when and how much I pay.)

But I digress... as I approached the mailbox, I noticed a guy standing in front of it. I figured he was dropping off a piece of mail like me. As I got closer I saw that he was outside for a smoke break. He was standing in such a spot that there was no way I or anyone else could get to the mailbox without stepping around him and into his cloud of smoke. The mailbox is directly in front of an open area, and had he chosen to stand in any other spot nearby, his smoke bomb would have offended no one. I have to wonder if a smoker would feel marginalized enough by the laws to do something like this on purpose, but I decided against asking him.

—Even if the T never gets around to putting transmitters in the subway tunnels, cell phones still work some of the time, which is unfortunate. Wednesday morning on the Orange Line, a young woman sat down next to me in the midst of a conversation that proceeded to go something like this:

"Tell her about MY new sneakers...Did you tell her?...Did you tell her?...Tell her about MY new sneakers...Tell her about mine...Tell her about mine...Did you tell her?...Did you tell her?...Did you tell her?...Did you tell her?...What did she say?...Really?...I'm gonna lose you, I gotta go."

I'm not exaggerating: she really did say "Did you tell her?" ten or twelve times. I'm thinking it was a reception issue. If there had been actual cell service in the tunnel, would she have had to repeat herself so many times? We'll never know.

Then I noticed she was wearing headphones. I noticed because, since she was done talking, I could hear the music coming out of her ear. And I wondered, was she listening to the music while talking on the phone? Because that probably would have affected her ability to hear the other end of her conversation. But I didn't want to look too closely at her, because the music coming out of those headphones was Journey's "Faithfully," and that's just so wrong on so many levels, I don't know where to begin.

Now, she could have had a cell phone that plays mp3s, and I'm fairly certain that those are engineered in such a way that you can't listen to music while on a call, but since I have an iPod with far more capacity than any phone-sized memory card, I don't really pay attention to such things (even though my own cell phone has this capability).

This was at 8:30 AM. Sometimes when I overhear these conversations, I wonder about why people feel the need to have incredibly lengthy and involved conversations so early in the day. I think back to twenty years ago, when I was young enough that I might have felt such a need, but even if cell phones had been common then, I can't imagine myself needing to talk to even my best friend before getting to work, wspecially about something as banal as new sneakers. And anyway, I'd much rather show my new sneakers to my friends than tell them about them over the phone.

—At the end of that same morning's ride, I was preparing to get off the train to switch to a bus. There was a fairly bulky dude standing directly in front of me, so I went through the motions of folding up my newspaper and putting it away, putting my cap back on, and otherwise telegraphng to him in the universally understood (or so I thought) mass transit code that I was about to get off the train, and it would be helpful to me if he would move a couple of inches in the direction of his choice to give me some room to stand up.

The train wasn't really crowded by this point, so he had plenty of room to move, but he chose to remain in the exact spot where I needed to be when I stood up. So the train reached the station and I stood up, putting myself very much inside his personal space, hoping he'd get the message that he was impeding my passage. As I moved toward the door of the train, instinct told me to look over my shoulder, and I saw him glaring at me, as though I had somehow committed an offense against him. I felt I had no choice but to glare back because it really was his fault, even though the whole incident was ridiculous and pointless, and never should have happened. Fortunately the rest of my trip to work that day was without incident, but some days it's just such a challenge, you wish you didn't have to bother.