As a person who is wider than most, I am pretty aware of my body and its proximity to others.
I will wait and hold a door open rather than trying to hustle through to beat another person to the threshold. In a narrow hallway, I will turn sideways and back against the wall as another person passes. I pinch in my shoulders on airplane seats so as not to spill over into another person’s space. In the gym, I look around to ensure I’m not going to wallop anyone while lifting weights. I’m exceedingly careful maneuvering through crowds so as not to ram into people.
Generally, I just try to avoid bumping, bashing or belting anyone in my orbit. It’s pretty much just common courtesy not to run into people. I also don’t want to come off as the meathead who just hammers into people because he has a better relationship with momentum.
I say this because I am growing frustrated with the rising number of people who lack spatial awareness. These are the people that don’t seem to realize that the space their body occupies has an impact on the people around them.
For instance, the person in the Walmart parking lot who walks toward the store in the very middle of the driving row. This person, whose top speed is “amble,” knows there are cars behind them, but feels no compulsion to move over to the side.
Once reaching the automatic door, this person will stop and check the shopping list on their phone just inside the vestibule, creating a pedestrian logjam.
Stores of any type are infested with these people, unaware of their own mass. They mosey down aisles. They explode into the center aisle without looking, causing other shoppers to take evasive maneuvers. Sometimes they pop out into the center and then stand there (pondering high-level math, apparently), forcing others to either stop or course correct. Occasionally, these creatures will be walking with the flow of other shoppers, but immediately turn and reverse course – the old wrong-way-on-the-highway move.
Amazingly enough, these people also believe their shopping carts also have no mass. They will jut a cart out into the center aisle like a bumper car at the county fair. They will leave a cart in the center of the frozen food aisle, snarling the traffic while they look for the perfect potpie. They will leave their cart unattended in a row while shuffling four aisles over because they forgot Velveeta.
The herding mentality of these spatial degenerates is also an issue. A few weeks ago I was in a local den of discounts when I turned down a row to find an older couple shopping for noodles, with two carts, parked side-by-side. This clog is often recreated when two friends decide to cozy up carts and catch up on the last six years of gossip.
Now look, like any good NASCAR event, any bargain mart is going to have some two-wide drama, but you can’t have a pair of Next Gen Camaros parked abreast in turn 3. If your party has two or more carts, you’d better line those babies up like a sad parade of regretful decisions.
Speaking of horizontal dangers, let’s talk about families at amusement parks. Same rules apply here as the in multi-carts, line ‘em up. You can’t have families of 4-12 members walking side-by-side, like the Brady Bunch at Kings Island.
And for God’s sake, if you are going to take a big group picture at the zoo get off to the side in some low-traffic area and try to be quick about it. There is nothing worse than a group of 20 having a picture taken in a high-traffic area. The size of the group necessitates that the photographer back way up, stopping traffic walking in both directions as patrons politely wait through 10 photos just to hear “now let’s do a funny one.” Get your group of mutants over by the aviary where nobody goes and bunch together if you want to make a memory.
I could go on and on about people just being unaware of where they are. People that stand in line at a restaurant for an extended time and then don’t know what they want to order when they get to the front of the line. These people forget that they are a cog in the wheel and they are slowing everything down. How about these people that use a drive-up ATM and then sit there organizing their money, on apparently tax returns, after completing their transaction, as the line grows behind them. Or these people that jump in the elevator when the doors open before allowing people to get off.
I joke that these people lack spatial awareness, but in reality we all know is actually lacking – courtesy. There is a growing idea in the world that what I am doing is more important than what you are doing.
There is too much “me” and not enough “us.”
-Chad Williamson is the managing editor at the Marysville Journal-Tribune.