Friday, July 4, 2008

Welcome to the Dark Side...

I'm going to let you all in on a secret - I have a rather well-developed passive agressive streak which likes to manifest itself whenever complete strangers do something that annoys me. Like this morning on my way to work. The first part of my commute takes place on a bus, and today it was full enough that I was standing in the back corner, hanging onto a pole and reading the highly amusing fine print at the bottom of a car advertisement. If you've ever ridden public transit, you've probably seen those people who, when the bus draws near to its destination, feel compelled to move toward the door at least 5 minutes before so that they're the first ones off. Normally this doesn't bother me, though I do laugh to myself at their pointless hurry (do those extra 10 seconds really matter?).

Well today I did not laugh as the man who was sitting in the back corner decided he needed to be one of those people. The problem was that the bus was rather crowded, so in standing up he had to step on my feet and shove me ahead of him, but there was nowhere to go after that because of all the people. So he stood there, basically on top of me, chomping at the bit to get ahead of everyone and out the door (all of this is taking place, of course, before we had even come to a stop). And I probably wouldn't have gotten annoyed if he had just mumbled an apology, but that didn't happen, so up reared the passive agressive streak.

As we pulled up to the last stop for the bus, I reached out and hung onto the poles on both sides of the bus under the guise of keeping my balance and then stood in such a way that I managed to effectively block Mr. Get-out-of-my-way-I'm-in-a-hurry in behind me. I then politely allowed everyone standing or sitting in front of me to precede me out of the bus, making him the last person to exit.

Does that make me evil?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

IMO, evil is being inconsiderate, pushy and unapologetic. You were just being karmic - dishing out what buddy deserved.