People are Dicks Sometimes

I'm a bit of an unwitting student of human dickery in that I am both overly aware of 'dick' activity and am fairly broad with the categorisation. For example, I have observed and/or assumed that most bus travellers (I exclude the elderly and infirm, mothers and babies) have a choice of two or sometimes three bus stops that would deliver them as close to their destination as is necessary before continuing on foot (weather permitting). As a result, I get bothered when I see a young fit thing (like the natural enemy of public transport travel, the school student) press the 'request stop' button immediately after a bus has left a suburban stop rather than just taking the hit for the team and walking the two blocks further to wherever they are heading. After all, the bus was stopping anyway... why not get off and save yourself the effort of pressing the button and your fellow travellers the pain of an additional stop? I just think that if we all worked together and coordinated our shared journey, the bus would only need to stop half as often and we would all get where we're going a lot faster and our knees would be pushed painfully into the back of the seat in front for a shorter amount of time. I've questioned others about this phenomenon, as i have felt this way for sometime and as a result of their indifference I now accept that i maybe apply the term 'dick' a little too liberally. I still think i've got a point, though.

But what of these occurences of dickery that I have observed today? Travelling on an almost full bus along King Street at what can be described roughly as 'lunchtime', four separate persons on my bus chose to sit on the aisle side of their otherwise empty two seaters. Now, in principle, I get what's going on here: ALL of us dream of spending the 25-35 minute bus ride to the city with a seat to call our own, but basic social niceties would not allow most of us (I hope) to actively repel a potential neighbour by creating a situation where they would need to ask us to move or worse still, shimmy through the already limited space to access the spare seat. And when I say I get it, I do truly get it: I dread having that spare seat taken so much that at every stop my stomach clenches as I will the Fairies of Personal Space to bless me a little longer with solitude and thighs unflanked by the flesh of strangers. (Strangely, once the seat has been taken, I will the Fairies of the Status Quo to not take away my new companion for the fear that they may be replaced by yet another set of strange thighs). But while I do understand the desire to be alone on a bus seat built for two, what really frustrated me about these aisle people today is that they seemed to assume expressions of entitlement and blissful ignorance as other passengers shuffled between the temporary seating in the wheelchair section into more desirable seats when the opportunity arose. It was like these four people were so special as to deserve a seat to themselves... and I hated them and their (to me) blatant display of dickery.

Fast forward an hour or two to Marrickville Metro as a large man, leaning heavily on his loaded shopping trolley, approached the escalator at the same time as me, though I was outpacing him two to one having just sidestepped a floaty mundane on a magical snails pace saunter through fairyland. He made no acknowledgement of me as he positioned his trolley o' junk fair and square in the middle of the footway and recommenced his tired and overweight lean on the handlebars... snookering me to remain behind him with five heavy shopping bags for the 45 second journey to the top. And I hated him too.

Is it me, or are these reasonable examples of dickery? I observed many more trivial assaults on human decency on my sojourn, but these were the two in particular that my ageing self is getting closer and closer to resolving with a small 'ahem' and then some gentle (aka assertive) notes about politeness, spacial awareness and cooperation in the modern world. Can't we all just get along?