Distracted But Not Me

Just thought I would post an incident that happened to me yesterday evening in the Wal Mart parking lot which has the rows of slanted parking spaces of course. I had parked facing out of a space and while I could have gone the wron gway out I chose to go over one more row and exit in the proper direction.
As I made the turn to exit I saw some guy about a 100 feet away enter the row between parked cars that I was on and he was face down texting furiously while walking dead center down the middle of the lane.

My thought was that the dumb xxxxxxx was never going to see me so I stopped when he was about 50 feet away and walking directly towards the front of my car. I just sat there and eyeballed him until he got about 15 feet away at which point I shifted into neutral and revved the engine.
That snapped him out of his texting stupor for about a second, he veered over out of the way (barely), and never missed a beat with the fingers…

Some people would have probably been frightened a bit by a revving engine at close range and the thought they were about to get flattened but not this guy. Total apathy.

In my state he would have been run down 1) from behind by a an elderly person with very weak eyesight driving the wrong way down that same lane, 2) from the front by a young person driving and texting or 3) from the side by a contractor’s truck doing what you did while on the phone ordering supplies.

Recently, a professor at William Paterson University did a study of “distracted walking” at the busiest intersection in NYC. The statistics that she compiled are pretty compelling–and should be upsetting to anyone who is interested in safety. It appears that the doofus who ok4450 encountered in that parking lot has a lot in common with other folks nowadays.

Be careful driving around bars, too. About 40% of pedestrians killed by cars are drunk.

“Be careful driving around bars”

Based on my recollections from my time in Wisconsin, that would make it very difficult to drive through many of the small towns in that state.

I was amazed that every little hamlet seemed to have 3 or 4 gin mills, even if there were only a handful of businesses in the entire town. Often, it seemed that all of the gin mills were in a fairly tight grouping near one intersection.

They are still that way @VDCdriver. We have three in our little town and it was pretty busy last night with the basketball game going on. I had to have a nice Prime Rib dinner. But I saw not a sole when I drive through town to go home.

I can’t tell you why Wisconsin has always been that way, but I don’t see much difference between someone going to the bar twice a week for a few drinks and someone sitting down in their own house and drinking. As long as you know your limit!!!
Maybe we in Wisconsin are just more sociable and want good conversation while tipping back a few. Like , why is the earth round, are chia pets the same as the container in the refrigerator, do cow farts really add to global warming, etc. etc…These are important issues.

Yosemite

This kind of behavior has gotten to the point where it just irritates me to no end. I told my wife the other day that whenever I go to the grocery, the mall, Wal Mart, or even a doctors’s office I feel like I’ve stepped into the Woody Harrelson movie “Zombieland”…

whenever I go to the grocery, the mall, Wal Mart, or even a doctors’s office I feel like I’ve stepped into the Woody Harrelson movie “Zombieland”.

+1

Why is it that nowadays, many (perhaps most) people choose to…
…stop dead in their tracks immediately upon entering a supermarket, thus blocking other conscious people–like you and me–from being able to enter? Are they just so overwhelmed by the beauty & the magnificence of the store? (sarcasm intentional)

…put their shopping cart on one side of the aisle (or, in many cases, squarely in the center of the aisle) while they stand across from their cart, effectively blocking anyone and everyone from getting past them?

…use the self-checkout machines, even if they have no clue about how to operate it, or even to read the directions on the screen or to comprehend the directions from store employees?

Regarding my last point, a few days ago I was in a Lowe’s store to buy a couple of furnace filters.
There was only one “regular” checkout open, and it had a fairly long line, so I opted to use the self checkout. The woman in front of me decided to place her huge purse in the area where you bag your merchandise after you scan it, and–as most of us are aware–that area weighs whatever you place there, in order to prevent you from bagging non-scanned merchandise.

Needless to say, her machine wouldn’t proceed, due to the weight of the “unknown object”, and the roving clerk had to come and clear the machine. Naturally, he told her to remove her purse from that area.

Yes–you guessed it!
As soon as he departed, she again placed her purse in the same place and again halted any progress. In total, the roving clerk had to clear her machine three times before she finally learned that her purse should not be placed where she insisted on putting it.

Yup!
Zombieland it is!

I agree with all of your comments VDCdriver and got a chuckle out of the “beauty and magnificence” one especially. That reminded me of Jay Leno commenting on a McDonald’s PSA about the opening of a new store in San Diego.
“Oh my; I wonder what, oh what, it would be like…”.

A year or so ago I stopped at Wal Mart and per the usual parked way out on the edge by myself.
When I came out I saw someone nudge a cart away from their car and take off rather than push the empty cart to the cart stand about 40 feet away.

The wind was really huffing and the cart took off across the lot. It appeared that if it stayed on the same path it was going to ram a car parked about 150 feet away so I dropped what I was doing and tried to chase it down. Unfortunately, a surgically repaired knee prevented me from catching it in time and the car managed to make a beeline and smashed into the driver’s door.

I dragged the cart away while wondering if the car owner could possibly be exiting the store and blaming me for it if they saw me. I was hoping that my half empty cart would be enough evidence to show that the cart wasn’t mine.
No doubt the owner of that car no was pretty hot later when they discovered a 6" crease in the door.

It’s very sad (pathetic maybe a better word) that someone parks on the edge of the lot and walks all of that distance so as to avoid damage to their car but has so little consideration for the cars belonging to others they couldn’t walk a few feet and place the empty cart into the stand.

I will say one thing. That empty cart surely must have set some kind of speed record as it was flat out flying. I didn’t think that I’d be able to run it down but it was worth a shot anyway.

VDCdriver: I am the same. If I needed a couple of furnace filters, I would go directly to their location choose the appropriate filters, and check out. I used the Wal-Mart self check out a couple of times. The second time an item would not scan and the attendant had to enter the code manually. The third time there was a rack of re-useable bags at the check out entrance. I decided to buy one, scanned it first and tried to scan my remaining items and place them in the bag. The scanner locked-up. The attendant explained that the bag was an unknown item like the purse you described. She said I would have to move the bag, put my items in a plastic bag, and put that in the re-useable bag. And the environmental advantage of the re-useable bag is…