So I am at the end of my rope, and Adam is close. Why can't people, normal people who have jobs and homes and raise families and do grocery shopping, just learn to live amongst OTHER PEOPLE WITHOUT BEING TOTAL EFFING ASSHOLES?
Earlier this week a co-worker was verbally attacked at a meeting and almost no one even raised an eyebrow. It was all I could do not to jump across the table, sliding vaseline across my lips and pulling my hair into a ponytail on the way there (a la Jess Savidge outside of The Rat one night in college). (Not really!)
More shocking, to me, than the fact that said attacker couldn't just keep their big yapper shut and NOT insult someone was the fact that it appeared to be completely acceptable to the 15 other people in the room. This is not to say that person didn't get a talking to later on, but I seriously doubt it. This was followed by several bouts of "interrupt-itis" as I like to call it, where one person tries to get a point across and is quickly cut off and talked over by someone else in the room. The original talker practically has to beg to be allowed to complete her sentence. It happens all the time and, as I said at the beginning of this post, I am coming to the end of my rope. MAYBE I work in the rudest workplace ever, but I don't think so. I think this is just status quo, and that makes me sad.
So Adam and I manage to get through the week without having our spirits totally crushed; then we come home for the weekend and believe that we are safe in our haven of polite behavior and happiness. Anyone who knows me and Adam knows we live a peaceful and quiet existence. We get along with people. We go out of our way to help our elderly neighbor. Early today I chaesd down her nasty little dog who had gotten out of her yard, almost got bit like three times, and still managed to get that mutt back home in one piece without kicking it. We are nice people. We believe that being nice to other people will result in the sort of reciprocative behavior that we would like, in other words we expect that those around us will be nice to us as well.
Earlier this year Adam and a few other guys in the neighborhood spent a solid 48 hours on a weekend replacing a water line in our neighborhood. The line goes through our yard and crosses the street. There are two valve boxes, one in the middle of our yard and one by the street. The one in the middle of the yard goes to our house. The one by the street goes to everyone else's house. People drive dangerously close to that one. We sent a letter explaining the problem. That didn't help. So for awhile we had a PVC pipe marking it. "Someone" stole it. So we put a paint bucket by it. Today I was planting tomato plants (different story) and our neighbor drove up, stopped by the bucket, sat there a minute, then drove up and stopped by the drive way and got out of her car to approach me. She demanded if we were going to move the valve. I said I didn't know. She said the "buckets and pipes" are a nuisance. I sent her to Adam. She proceeded to yell at Adam about where our property boundary ends. She insisted the actual road goes through our yard. Fine, he said. Have the county come out and re-do the road. She didn't like that option, almost certainly because it would require some sort of effort on her part, without any bit of instant gratification. Anyway, the point of this post is that she came up in MY YARD and tried to bully us into God knows what - I'm not sure what she thought she was going to accomplish. It's not like we were going to say okay, great, just drive through our yard wherever you believe the actual road is supposed to be. Like any normal person, we're perfectly willing to have a conversation. But this is the first time anyone has even approached us about how we have our yard laid out, yet apparently it was cause for combativeness. I just don't understand it.
I have to admit that I am so GOSH DARN tired of people thinking they can just come around and bitch and yell and just in general be jerks. This is not normal behavior! And it makes me mad because Adam tries so hard to be a nice guy. Later today, I told him to move that damn bucket. People can drive over the valve all day long and when the water line breaks no one else in the neighborhood will have water. They were warned to drive carefully. I know, because we sent a letter. Well he couldn't do it. Because he was worried about everyone not having water. Because he is a NICE PERSON, not an ASSHOLE.
When do nice people become crotchety old people? At what age does the crushing reality of the world finally sink into the hearts of the good people and blacken their souls? Each and every day I feel less like being a nice person and more like being a bitch. With each trip to the grocery store, to Home Depot, to the mall - I feel a deeper urge to let a door close in another person's face or to bypass a tipped over potted plant without righting it. I am about one person cutting me off on the highway away from never using my blinker ever again.
The moral of this story: Almost everyone has a neighbor. If you are reading this, try to think of your neighbors as your partners in property ownership. They can help you! You just have to be a nice person!!
No comments:
Post a Comment