Supermarket rant #3

This hasn't happened to me in ages, partly due to now refusing to go to the supermarket during the peak hours, but also the extended trading hours also mean that its easier to go late in the afternoon/evening with the oddball people, rather than the crazy people crowd.

But what I used to get alot of, was when in the checkout queue, the person behind is so close with their trolley that it's smacking into the back of my ankles. It's as if by putting pressure on me, I will then somehow make the checkout person work faster. Or perhaps they hope I'll pay the passive-aggressive irritation forward, until it reaches the helpless soul who is currently being served.

A quiet stare, or even just nudging the trolley back usually brings that to an end, but it rarely illicited an apology, just a sullen glance.

This is all in the past though, as I seem to be managing to avoid these queues at the moment. But where I am now getting this behaviour is in the airlines check-in queues. Next time you are flying somewhere and you're in the long queue to check your bags in, just see how long it takes before the person behind you is climbing in your back pocket.

One of *those* people

Happened to be in a baby store the other day (people have babies, gotta get presents). These are one of those places where I think it can be really awkward for a guy, in this case a guy who doesn't have any children, as you feel as if everyone else secretly knows that you don't have a reason to be there. Kind of like being a bloke in a lingerie store.

However, baby shops are also quite fascinating due to all the stuff that is available for parents these days. When I talk to my parents and people from that generation, children were raised in furniture that was not far removed from a cardboard box and shredded newspaper. Now there are a million gadgets and fancy electronic toys to help your child grow to become the next world wonder.

One of the things I find interesting is prams. There's one pram which folds and unfolds itself with the touch of a button that triggers electric motors to drive the whole process (See Origami http://www.4moms.com/origami).

But of the regular prams where parents have to press levers, twist handles and fold stuff, they're all different and a little counter-intuitive for non-parents.

Anyway, I'd taken to amusing myself by trying to see if I could work out how to collapse each pram on display, valiantly waving off offers of help by the sales assistants. After working through all the models on display, I spotted one off to one side that looked radically different to all the others that I'd been playing with, so excited at the new challenger, I began to twist and prod buttons, trying to decipher its secrets when the owners of this particular pram walked over to see what I was doing.

Its quite embarrassing to discover that I'd been fervently trying to break someone's personal property, and I also learnt that it isn't wise to leave your pram unattended in a baby store...

Supermarket rant #2

This has happened to me more than once. Seriously. I think about 3 or four times now. I'd like to think its because of some special charismatic magnetic aura that surrounds me, but my wife just checked and apparently that's not it. *shrug* oh well...

Anyway, the issue is people crowding me. Again with the supermarket, but it also happened once in a larger mall while I was waiting outside a clothing store, too.

When I'm with people who are shopping, and I'm waiting for them, then I'll look to find a quiet place to stand where I can either people watch or just daydream. Now where things get weird is when I find that of all the open space available everywhere, a group of other people then end up standing uncomfortably close and just hover. Its like some weird flash trolling mob. They're not shopping for stuff where I'm standing, and this isn't the only quiet place in the store to stop to socialise, they just picked to stand really close to me, such that I almost look as though I'm with them.

The most recent case of this was when I was down south at a country supermarket, and ended up with a group of 6 asian uni students having their morning chat right up against me. What made this particular instance worse was that, as a group, we were now blocking passage through the deli section of the supermarket, and our configuration now meant that if a person needed to get through, they would most likely angle towards me to squeeze past. This group was indirectly forcing me to move and that was really burning me up. I've read about other people trying thousand yard stares, but my attempt at that didn't work, so in the end I shuffled a few steps left and went back to focusing on keeping calm.

Stuff like that makes me dislike people.

Now, don't take away from this that it is anything to do with them being asian, or uni students, or anything like that, as its happened to me from different age groups and demographics. You'll just get people from all walks of life who bug you, and I just have to learn to deal with it.

Supermarket rant #1

I hate going to the supermarket, and its because of the people. Not the staff, but the customers. I hate the self absorbed, inconsiderate, inpolite, and just plain weird mode that people go into when they're in food aisles.

I see stuff that makes me see red when around the regular mall, but in the Woolsworths and Coles is where it hits its peak. This kind of thing frustrates me in two ways;

1. I don't understand why people lose awareness of others,
2. God requires that I care for people and not turn into a raging homicidal maniac (so leave the chainsaw at home).

This rant is about trolleys. When I go shopping with my wife, my job is to push the trolley around so that she can focus on what needs to be bought and she doesn't have to deal with the whole wonky trolley wheel thing. Maybe it is a job that is so complex and demanding that it really does require a person to be fully devoted to it. I don't know, it doesn't seem hard, but the number of people who just let go of the trolley wherever it is, when they reach the section they want, is astonishing.

I often encounter aisles where people have done one of the following:

• parked their trolley neatly on one side, but then are alongside it looking at the opposite shelves, effectively blocking the aisle and ignoring my presence,
• just left their trolley in the middle of the aisle and wandered further down the shelves,
• are themselves purely a trolley driver while their partner shops, and decide to park with their trolley perpendicular to traffic.

And why do I always get the dirty look and silent treatment when I reach out to move their trolley to the side?

*sigh* I just need to remember to breathe and just let it be water off a duck's back. And perhaps start looking more seriously at using Coles online shopping service...

Resume regular broadcasting

Oops, really slid off the face of the earth there for a bit.

I actually had a post lined up to say that I'd be less regular about writing stuff during the 2 weeks over Christmas, but I couldn't even get off my butt to post that. Damn.

Anyway, it was a busy couple of weeks during the office shutdown; installed one of those spinning roof vent things, and went around scraping all the paint off the gutters around the house, and then repainting it all. That was a bigger project than I expected. For some reason I though the painting would be done in 2 days, but 5 days later, and I still have a quarter of the gutters left to be painted. Should be done with one more day's effort, but I've already just written that my estimation abilities are lousy.

If you don't laugh, you'll cry

The past week has been up around 40 degrees and its been hot. It'll still be hot for the next week, but dipping just below 30 on a few days. (The weather people are actually saying it'll be mostly below 30, but over the years I've been here, I've learned to add a couple of degrees to the forecast during summer).

Anyway, my wife and I are heading south for a couple of days down to the coast. Its only a couple of hours south, and I figured it'd just be a few degrees cooler. It isn't just going to be cooler, it'll be below 20 and raining most of the time.

This is not what I had envisioned, as I was looking forward to some swimming and hanging out by the beach. Instead it looks like we'll be stuck with being indoors and reading. Bummer.

Lovable rogue

This is something that confuses me a little bit, and I'm wondering if anyone quite knows why. On the surface, I would say that I would frown on criminal activities, particularly those which would seem to be quite black and white such as robbing a bank or any other brick & mortar institution. Yet there are films, that I admit I enjoy, where the protagonist(s) are career criminals yet myself and the viewers are intended to be drawn to them and to actually cheer for them as they engage in their escapades. Now I know that movies are all fiction, and we're not supposed to take it seriously, but remember that society always draws a line, and people generally don't tolerate certain things in movies, even with the argument of it being fiction. There are some things that we don't tolerate being portrayed in film, I know there are directors who have tried but I'm not even going to touch those extremes as that is something that people need to discuss face to face, rather than on a broad medium like blogs.

But moving away from the fringe cases, and back to mainstream; I find it weird that I enjoy some films where the premise is actually not a good thing. The films that come to mind are ones such as Inside Man (www.imdb.com/title/tt0454848), the Oceans series - I haven't watched the original - of Oceans 11 (www.imdb.com/title/tt0240772) Oceans 12 (www.imdb.com/title/tt0349903) and Oceans 13 (www.imdb.com/title/tt0496806), The Italian Job - again I haven't seen the original - (www.imdb.com/title/tt0317740), and I'm sure there's countless more examples. When I consider the context of the films, the primary characters may have their own set of "lines they won't cross" but they are still engaged in taking stuff that isn't theirs for the purpose of funding a free-wheeling, fun loving lifestyle that can come apart in an instant.

Now, because the dialog is witty, their banter is clever, the weather sunny, and the individuals attractive, we're then drawn to admiring and subliminally wanting what the characters have. Bizarre isn't it?

Maybe this is a guy thing, as perhaps women have a better perspective on how ridiculous these films are, but then does the propensity of romance films just work on a different set of triggers for the fairer gender?

Well I find myself thinking occasionally about The Fast & The Furious series for which I was amongst the mad few to buy the director edition DVDs for the first few movies, at least until reason caught me up. I love tinkering with cars, but the experience also taught me just how prohibitively expensive and time consuming the hobby is to engage with, not to mentioned generally futile. Ask any individual involved even in social racing clubs, and you'll start to observe the presence of corporate sponsorship in order to fund hobby. Then there's the rest of the lifestyle of Dom, Brian, et al...

At the end of the day, I'm thinking that entertainment is just providing the escapism of momentarily being in a world where we can be in our fantasy, however unrealistic or unacceptable that fantasy world may be. I'm wary of that the liberties taken by entertainment may shift my sense or morals, so I need to moderate how much of that I take in.

But I do enjoy George Clooney's charm, so I won't stay away from it completely.