General Stupidity can ruin your whole day...
General Stupidity can ruin your whole day...
Honestly, I've been trying to keep people from pissing me off. I should be really happy with the Peanut's arrival just days away.
But stupid people just keep giving me heartburn.
Here's just a selection of what's pushing my buttons:
1) When you hear a siren or see flashing lights, don't just stop in the middle of the street, pull over and get out of the emergency vehicle's way! More than once I've seen a line of vehicles come to a dead stop in the middle of the street blocking emergency vehicles, forcing them to take dangerous actions to get around them or just lay on the air horn to get them out of the way. If you can't figure it out, it's this simple: move it or lose it!
2) There is a white line ahead of the crosswalk in the intersection. You are supposed to stop at that line, not half way across the crosswalk. I can't begin to tell you how many times other parents, crossing guards, and myself have screamed at drivers to move back so our kids can get across the street safely. I've contemplated taking my baseball bat with me to explain where the line is with some forceful punctuation!
3) So that you fully understand, it is right turn on red after stop. That doesn't mean right turn on red after slowing down to the speed limit just before screeching around the corner. Once again, I can't tell you how many times Bubba Brown and I have almost gotten taken out by a driver trying to beat the traffic through a light that just turned red and ours to cross the other way turned green. Baseball bat time again.
4) It amazes me how many people are offensive, rather than defensive drivers. Their attitude is one of get the hell out of my way, I'm more important than you. No, you're not. That attitude makes you an accident looking for a place to happen.
5) When you're driving, drive. Don't BS with passengers or your friends or significant other on the phone, be-bop to music, change the radio station or the CD. Drive. If you have to do any of that, stop the car and do it, then drive. While you're there, in the words of Julia Stiles in 10 Things I Hate About You, "Remove head from sphincter, then drive."
6) Read the traffic signs. All of them. Metro makes a small fortune from the people who are too broke to pay attention at Nellis and Charleston and illegally U-turn there. It cost one friend between the fines and court costs $250. periodically Metro puts two motorcycle cops at that corner and they easily catch a dozen an hour if not more.
7) Will it kill you to be civil? How much effort does it take to smile at someone? Honestly, I know the economy is in the dumper and things are generally crappy now, but I fail to understand the nasty attitude that virtually everyone has these days. That includes a grouping of people that I never had a serious complaint about until now: senior citizens. Honestly, the nasty and incivility bug used to be limited to the young, the foreign-born, and people of color, but these days it seems to be universal. No one wants to be remotely nice.
The majority of CAT drivers are civil and polite, but there are a growing number of them who are turning out to have received their customer service training from McDonalds, as in, screw you, you get it our way or not at all. Our favorite lousy CAT driver, who my wife and I nicknamed Grizzly Adams, continues to louse up the Nellis bus route. Now we found yet another driver on Charleston who has proceeded to make service on CAT as intolerable as Mr. Adams.
Last week this new driver, a person of color, had a bus with a non-working stop bell. My 8 1/2 month pregnant wife didn't know this until she tried to ring the bell and the driver didn't stop. She called out the the driver to stop and was rewarded with a "too bad, you have to wait until the next stop." Other drivers in that situation will apologize and stop immediately. Not this piece of human debris.
CAT, is it too much to ask of you to do what some of your drivers do to protect your interests in keeping middle-class people riding the buses? Namely:
1) Insist that elderly, disabled, pregnant and passengers with small children are seated before moving the buses. I guarantee that you are going to see a lawsuit over this if you don't address this with some of your drivers.
2) Insist that rowdy passengers are ejected from the bus if they are disturbing passengers.
3) Call a supervisor if you can't handle it. That's what they're there for.
I think I'll post my original McDonalds rant up this week on the web site so those of you who wonder why I bring up McDonalds as a paragon of lousy customer service. We don't miss them. Check our site out at rant.wyattcox.net and let us know what pisses you off...
Honestly, I've been trying to keep people from pissing me off. I should be really happy with the Peanut's arrival just days away.
But stupid people just keep giving me heartburn.
Here's just a selection of what's pushing my buttons:
1) When you hear a siren or see flashing lights, don't just stop in the middle of the street, pull over and get out of the emergency vehicle's way! More than once I've seen a line of vehicles come to a dead stop in the middle of the street blocking emergency vehicles, forcing them to take dangerous actions to get around them or just lay on the air horn to get them out of the way. If you can't figure it out, it's this simple: move it or lose it!
2) There is a white line ahead of the crosswalk in the intersection. You are supposed to stop at that line, not half way across the crosswalk. I can't begin to tell you how many times other parents, crossing guards, and myself have screamed at drivers to move back so our kids can get across the street safely. I've contemplated taking my baseball bat with me to explain where the line is with some forceful punctuation!
3) So that you fully understand, it is right turn on red after stop. That doesn't mean right turn on red after slowing down to the speed limit just before screeching around the corner. Once again, I can't tell you how many times Bubba Brown and I have almost gotten taken out by a driver trying to beat the traffic through a light that just turned red and ours to cross the other way turned green. Baseball bat time again.
4) It amazes me how many people are offensive, rather than defensive drivers. Their attitude is one of get the hell out of my way, I'm more important than you. No, you're not. That attitude makes you an accident looking for a place to happen.
5) When you're driving, drive. Don't BS with passengers or your friends or significant other on the phone, be-bop to music, change the radio station or the CD. Drive. If you have to do any of that, stop the car and do it, then drive. While you're there, in the words of Julia Stiles in 10 Things I Hate About You, "Remove head from sphincter, then drive."
6) Read the traffic signs. All of them. Metro makes a small fortune from the people who are too broke to pay attention at Nellis and Charleston and illegally U-turn there. It cost one friend between the fines and court costs $250. periodically Metro puts two motorcycle cops at that corner and they easily catch a dozen an hour if not more.
7) Will it kill you to be civil? How much effort does it take to smile at someone? Honestly, I know the economy is in the dumper and things are generally crappy now, but I fail to understand the nasty attitude that virtually everyone has these days. That includes a grouping of people that I never had a serious complaint about until now: senior citizens. Honestly, the nasty and incivility bug used to be limited to the young, the foreign-born, and people of color, but these days it seems to be universal. No one wants to be remotely nice.
The majority of CAT drivers are civil and polite, but there are a growing number of them who are turning out to have received their customer service training from McDonalds, as in, screw you, you get it our way or not at all. Our favorite lousy CAT driver, who my wife and I nicknamed Grizzly Adams, continues to louse up the Nellis bus route. Now we found yet another driver on Charleston who has proceeded to make service on CAT as intolerable as Mr. Adams.
Last week this new driver, a person of color, had a bus with a non-working stop bell. My 8 1/2 month pregnant wife didn't know this until she tried to ring the bell and the driver didn't stop. She called out the the driver to stop and was rewarded with a "too bad, you have to wait until the next stop." Other drivers in that situation will apologize and stop immediately. Not this piece of human debris.
CAT, is it too much to ask of you to do what some of your drivers do to protect your interests in keeping middle-class people riding the buses? Namely:
1) Insist that elderly, disabled, pregnant and passengers with small children are seated before moving the buses. I guarantee that you are going to see a lawsuit over this if you don't address this with some of your drivers.
2) Insist that rowdy passengers are ejected from the bus if they are disturbing passengers.
3) Call a supervisor if you can't handle it. That's what they're there for.
I think I'll post my original McDonalds rant up this week on the web site so those of you who wonder why I bring up McDonalds as a paragon of lousy customer service. We don't miss them. Check our site out at rant.wyattcox.net and let us know what pisses you off...
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