Street Etiquette

Don’t you just hate it when you’re walking along the street in busy pedestrian traffic and people are just so rude? They don’t move an inch to facilitate your getting past them!! I was walking down Oxford St (that of Monopoly fame) a little while back and was getting very riled up by the amount of people virtually walking straight into me. Now granted that London is a busy place (over three million people are moved on the underground every day - that’s 75% of NZ’s population!), however, I still don’t see the harm in someone meeting you half way by moving over a foot (see I’m in England now so I’m reverting back to imperial measures) to allow the passing of both parties in relative ease – I was pretty angry and someone was going to get a dropped shoulder before too long!! Come to think of it most people down Oxford St are probably tourists – bloody foreigners.

Anyway, so it reminded me of the Oxford St incident yesterday when I was walking to work in the rain and had my umbrella up along with 95% of everyone else. Now funnily enough I generally don’t have too many complaints about the footpath etiquette of the people around where I work, as I think we are all in the same boat and just want to get where we are going. However, on a wet day the footpath’s useable space is immediately halved by the multitude of people with opened umbrellas and life becomes a jungle again. You really have to keep your wits about you in order to avoid losing an eye to an oncoming umbrella. So as always I tried to think of how this could be avoided and came upon the idea of either 1) extendable footpaths (probably not that feasible) or 2) transparent elongated umbrellas. Then again I thought why doesn’t everyone just wear a coat?