Can someone please explain to me why consistency is such a problem? There are tons of examples of this, but I’ll give you one example that I encountered over the past few days that really got this ball rolling in my head.

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Yeah, so obviously it’s not Wednesday.  I could have tinkered with the posting date, but why?  No need.  Who am I to manipulate time like that?  Last night I sat here with the post screen open and couldn’t bring myself to write anything.  It’s been a long few days.  But apparently the world doesn’t go on “Dawn’s exhausted, let’s act normal” hiatus when things are hitting the proverbial fan.

I went back to the hospital after work tonight, and at about 9 pm, Mom sent me on a “hot tea” run.  The cafe is open 24 hours, so that was clearly my first choice.  In I went, and there were only three other customers in the cafe.  All three were off around the side of the counter to pick up orders they had put in (they worked in the hospital.  I could tell by the scrubs.  I miss wearing scrubs.  But I digress…).  The cafe is relatively large–three “U” shaped bars that easily fit about 25 people each.  So I sat down to wait to order the tea, and after a few minutes another customer came in. 

Where did she sit?  74 empty seats in the entire cafe, and where do you think she sat?  That’s right.  She plopped down right next to me.  No empty seat between us, not across the big U shaped bar, but right next to me.  Who does that?!  I seriously don’t understand what could compel someone, when given the choice between all of those seats, to saddle up right next to a complete stranger.  I don’t think she even thought it was strange!  I was startled that she sat there, and so I assumed I probably knew her, but nope.  I looked at her, she looked at me, and I had never seen her before.  So I turned back around and waited for the server to take my order, utterly confused by this strange behavior.  What made it worse was that I noticed that she was staring at me.  Staring at me!  A complete stranger.  Staring.  I honestly felt like I was in the Twilight Zone.  I was too tired to even question her behavior and decided to walk over to the side counter just in case her brand of crazy was contagious.

It’s a behavior that makes me nuts, and it’s not relegated to hospital cafes only.  The other place it always seems to happen to me is in a movie theater.  When a friend and I went to see Ice Harvest, we were the only two in the entire theater.  We had the perfect seats–3/4 of the way up the stadium seating, directly in the center.  Perfect!  Just as the previews were ending an elderly couple decided to sit directly in front of us.  Not a few rows down in the same seats, not even staggered so there was any space.  Right in front of us.  They had an entire theater to choose from, but they decided that they needed to sit right there.  It was so ridiculous that we couldn’t control our laughing, and it certainly didn’t help that Ice Harvest was a really dark comedy.  We found ourselves openly laughing–probably much harder than we would have if the other couple wasn’t there–and when they wouldn’t laugh, we found it even funnier. 

I’m sorry, but there are unspoken rules about these things.  When you enter a public place first, you have dibs on where you want to sit.  There’s a buffer zone that you anticipate, and rightfully so!  Filling up public spaces is like Minesweeper.  Think about it.  It’s true.  When other people don’t abide by these rules, it becomes a complete distraction.   Have you ever been on a bus or subway car that was empty except for you?  Have you ever had someone get on at the next stop only to sit beside you when there is an entire vehicle of open seats?  Yeah.  I have.  That’s why I make a beeline to the individual, anti-social seats.  For the rest of the ride I sat there in a state of confusion and astonishment.  Everyone knows that that kind of behavior is weird.  That means that the people who do this are either completely socially inept (and possibly crazy), or they are doing it intentionally to see what kind of response they’ll get.  I don’t like either of those two options, quite frankly. 

The next time someone does this, I’m going to ask them why.  Is there a memo I missed?  Is there a secret game going on that I don’t know about?  Have they recently been released from being held prisoner in a cave, or were they possibly just separated from their Siamese twin and are lonely?  Whatever the reason, I’m demanding an explanation next time. 

Write well,

Dawn

I like to rant.  Get me started on a topic that irks me and I could go forever!  So where better to do this than on my blog?  I figure once the month of lists ends next week, I’ll have to come up with some kind of theme or schedule that will keep me on track, and what better than a weekly rant?  I’ll give you fair warning, though:  Topics will vary, as will seriousness.  Generally, topics will cover any and every thing that inspires the “WTF?!” response from me and maybe you. 

Having said that, the very first “WTF?! Wednesday” was spawned from something that happened to me yesterday while at work.  Actually, I was coming in from taking a walk outside for a brief break.  See, I have this ritual of sorts.  I go out for a break, come back in, go get a drink from the water fountain, and then go back in.  Not so yesterday.  My daily 3:30 ritual was all screwed up.

When I climbed the stairs, standing there at the water fountain–a community water fountain, mind you, there right in the open–was a young girl who looked to be in her 20’s, and she was brushing her teeth. 

Did you catch that?  Brushing. Her. Teeth!  IN the water fountain!  She actually was scrubbing, going “up like the sun, down like the rain, and back and forth like a choo-choo train” right there in the middle of the open community area.  Surely I was seeing things, right?  I thought so at first.  Then she spit.  And it wasn’t a dainty “rinse and spit” either.  Oh, no… There was sound involved. This girl took her rinsing and spitting seriously, and left the remains of her brushing sitting right there in the fountain. 

There was froth.  I saw it.  I saw it even from a distance! 

I don’t know about you, but certain sounds can make me gag or grate on my nerves until I nearly lose my mind.  Loud gulping, chewing, vomiting, and spitting all make me lose it.  Hearing Toothbrush Girl nearly made me run past her to the restroom, but I was so dumbfounded to see this going on that I was stuck standing there staring.

As if that wasn’t enough, she then looked at me–I was standing against the far wall with a look of utter horror–and proceeded to clean her toothbrush in the fountain!! 

Are you EVEN serious!?  Who does that?! Who does that when the bathroom, complete with four, count ‘em, four sinks and a door, is no more than 10 steps away??  At what point does someone make a decision that, “Hey, I don’t need to go to the bathroom to do this in the sink where normal people would go, I’ll go ahead and do it right here in the open, where people DRINK, and leave my nasty germs all up in this piece!”  I bet she leaves the sink all gross and nasty after she brushes at home too–or worse yet–at someone else’s house.  And she showed no inkling that this was improper behavior whatsoever!

Maybe I’m the only one who is profoundly disturbed by this, but I’ll be taking bottled water from now on, thankyouverymuch.  I have nothing against good, proper oral hygiene, and I know plenty of people who brush their teeth after lunch, but they all do it in the bathroom where anyone within hearing range can just turn and be sick in the appropriate place.  It didn’t even phase her that I was watching!  It was like a train wreck, I assure you.  I didn’t want to look, but I couldn’t help myself!  I was so thrown by the event that I couldn’t even say, “Hey, you know the rest room is right there…” or, more likely, “Uh, excuse me, but WTF are you doing?!”  I was speechless. 

So, boys and girls, the lesson for today is always do your brushing in a toothbrush appropriate place where you won’t be pointed out and made the subject of a blog post.  And don’t even get me started on people who talk on the phone in public rest rooms… That’s a topic for another Wednesday.

Write well,

~Dawn