Monday 9 July 2007

More Weirdness

You know what’s weird? When you get on a bus that’s almost empty, and you think, “Ah, great, I can spread out all my stuff on the seat beside me and relax, because there are so many empty seats.” Then at the next stop, somebody (usually an old lady) gets on, passes all the completely empty seats and hovers at yours, forcing you to pick up your bags and scrunch up so that she can sit next to you. Isn’t that strange? That’s happened to me twice in the past few months. And the other day it happened to a girl sitting in the seat in front of me. She spent the next ten minutes looking astonished. It was quite funny.

What should you do? Part of me wants to immediately say “excuse me”, force the person to get up to let me out, then pointedly sit somewhere else. The other part of me worries about hurting their feelings in case they’re genuinely barmy. But then, by definition, they must be genuinely barmy.

Another weird thing: have you noticed, every time there’s a sex scene in a novel, the heroine is always wearing a ‘front-clasping’ bra (though not for long). Yet, has anyone actually seen or heard of one of these in real life?

Now this is strange: Parcels delivered not just to our door, but to the computer table inside the front room. Not that I’m complaining, exactly; it’s just that it just seems strange that Post Office employees are actually breaking and entering in order to provide a better service. In England they employ a technique I term ‘hit and run’ – they knock on the door, drop one of those ‘sorry, we couldn’t deliver your parcel’ cards through the letterbox, then run to the van and drive off as fast as possible while you’re making a mad dash for the door. I’m so glad they don’t do that here. I’m just perplexed because it doesn’t seem consistent with the service you get inside the actual Post Office, where workers are churlish, humourless and sullen.

The Man reckons the postmen/ladies are somehow sliding the window open from the outside, then feeding the parcels in through the bars, then closing the window again. Whereas, I think it’s possible that the neighbours (who have a key) are bringing the parcels in when they see them sitting outside. Still, I’m not sure that’s something they would do. I’ll have to ask them next time I see them.

2 comments:

Rosanna said...

When people do that to me on public transport, I always say 'I'm sorry, but could you not sit elsewhere?'

Or I move.

It's just so rude! I can understand if it were packed full, or you were taking up a hundred seats - but when you only occupy two empty seats on an empty bus, they should use their eyeballs.

Sprite said...

I congratulate you. I have no backbone, so I have to content myself with an evil glare.