Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Disorganised Rage!

I was reading the news that Lewisham is one of the angriest places in London whilst at the same time listening to a debate on the radio about MPs expenses where half the callers didn't even seem to know what they were angry about. They knew *who* they were angry at but when they tried to articulate that anger it all fell apart.

So thinking about anger I do think there is a strong dose of peer pressure involved sometimes. If you take traffic wardens, who are basically a group of people who do a socially useful job and have to deal with often angry members of the public, you'd have thought that society would give them a little bit of status - but no - they are universally vilified as if anti-social parking that can inconvenience large numbers of people was some sort of human right.

However, it's somehow acceptable to see traffic wardens as less than human and that actually makes their job more dangerous because some people take that as the green light to become abusive or worse when they're caught blocking everyone else's way and being a pain.

It got me thinking about the things that make me angry that *aren't* common currency. It didn't take me long to remember that there is one big one.

BAGS.

I have to say that those bloody bags that people trail along behind themselves are becoming more and more annoying as they become more and more common. On the tube sometimes it is nothing less than an obstacle course of these blooming trailers.

They're an obstacle at best and sometimes a positive hazard. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen someone go up the escalator with one of these things and then stop at the top causing the next person to trip over them. Particularly when you get a few people together with these things it becomes a real problem, especially in crowds.

Obviously they are useful if you want to transport lots of things across the capital/world and it's difficult to raise the rage you feel about these objects in polite society because more and more of us are becoming offenders.

So what's your unacceptable hate object/behaviour? I'm sure there are lots of things that make us angry that we all share (racism, injustice, etc) but it's those things that fall between the cracks, that it's hard to come clean about that I'm really interested in.

6 comments:

ModernityBlog said...

Jim,

You could rename the blog to grumpy old green :)

SteveG said...

I heard the people of Lewisham were really angry when they found out they were top of the list...

weggis said...

So what's your unacceptable hate object/behaviour?

1. People who complain about my bag!

2. People who get angry like this:
The convention on escalators is for people to stand on the right and walk on the left. Warren Street has a very long escalator. So I'm with my brother in law in the morning rush hour and we walk a couple of steps up on the left and stop - because there is a folded wheelchair blocking my way. When I'm about half way up lots of people behind me start screaming for me to get out of the effing way. Fortunately a woman a couple of places behind me screamed back at them explaining what was happening.

People who get angry by making assumptions about what they can’t see.

Jim Jepps said...

Are we building an escalator theme here?

Anonymous said...

DONGLE RAGE! I think this particular rage is peculiar to me, the Lewisham Green Party campaign shop, and the limitations of my laptop to cope with mobile broadband, however.

Aaron said...

MMm.. when people get in the shower just as I want to..!