Friday, July 28, 2006

Also, hilarity

Best referrer tracking hit ever:

"Windschuttle is a windbag"

It only makes me sad that Lasting Ephemera is as yet the only hit for that.

Thursday, July 27, 2006

It's all about image

I've never been inclined to concern myself with appearances. Particularly my own. I suppose when I was young I just didn't think of it; I'd never been taught that looks were more important than character and intelligence, and by the time I encountered that mindset... Well, I was never going to fit in anyway. I accepted my freakdom, eventually with pride, and have always done my best not to judge other people by appearances either.

For the most part, my friends don't seem to either. Very few people I've known at uni have, either, and when I have gone places where appearances are what matter... I've more-or-less been looking appropriate for my identity, as it was constructed at the time.

Which is why it's mildly disconcerting to spend time around people who *do* judge by appearances. I don't necessarily mean that in a harsh way, but...

Okay, I have a new jacket. It's an awesome jacket - waterproof, with a hood that tucks away into the collar and a zip-out liner. It's also bright neon yellow with stripes of reflective silver for night visibility. This jacket is visible from space. It's supposed to be; the idea is that it makes me more visible while I'm riding my motorcycle, day or night, and thus makes it less likely that people will fail to see me and kill me by accident. The guy who sold it to me commented that people would probably see the bright yellow and think I was a cop. I wore it to work today even though I didn't ride to work, because I don't have another raincoat and the weather was vile. Everyone who saw it commented, and most of them made a joke about my becoming a construction worker/joining a road gang.

It's symptomatic of a tendency common among my workmates to judge by image, really a lot. I feel like a judgmental sort of bitch for the fact that I think a lot of my coworkers are shallow, for reading celebrity gossip magazines all the time instead of anything with what I regard as merit, but... it's not just the magazines, it's this whole general trend. I think it's part of what's starting to bug me about working there.

There's this whole dynamic of Appropriate Behaviour or people get hostile - I recently provoked great irritation from one guy by breaching this unwritten code. My breach was in not playing nice enough with something that would, essentially, make the rest of my shift slightly more irksome but grant him something he wanted; the hierarchy factor in his needs, in his view, outweighing mine was this whole complicated thing to do with the night shift being a) cliquey and b) convinced they're superior to the rest of us (some of them consider me to be semi-night shift, and therefore I get semi-included in some of their dynamic, which included one of the nicer ones venting her annoyance to me about some of the day-shift people who were on a little later than usual who were sitting in the night shifts' regular seats.

We have hot seating, which means you pick a free chair and sit in it; people who work the quieter periods tend to have preferences for where they want to sit, and dislike sitting anywhere else, ever. I have my own preferences for where to sit, it's true, but I don't get shirty about other people sitting there if they've claimed it before I show up. My favourite seat is also uncontested with the night shift. The guy who got annoyed with me was wanting a seat not his usual seat for frivolous purposes; my contention was that:

a) I was sitting there first
b) It was my preferred seat
c) That seat did not serve his claimed goal at all, so wtf
d) I was in a bad mood and did not feal like giving up my seat of preference

Yes, adults in a professional environment do have interpersonal issues over crap this trivial.

But that's rather the point; it's all so irksomely banal, and so much of it is wasted time and effort. There are expectations on who you greet, how much of a conversation you will have with them (or non-conversation, really, since giving a sincere answer to the formulaic questions like "how are you" is even more discouraged than in usual society, so much so that people will often skip actually answering the question at all, even in a token answer), and I spend most of my breaks exchanging these phrases with people because social interaction in the workplace takes up all your free time for no meaning. Again, it's all style, no substance. Just occasionally I'd like to skip spending thirty seconds on "Hi, how's it going?" "Not bad, yourself?" "Yeah, pretty good. Looking forward to the weekend." "Yeah, me too." "Isn't it cold today?" "Freezing, the air con is really messed up." and/or formulaic complaints about customers. If you try to introduce an actual topic to a conversation, people always react with surprise before they drag up a response.

Anyway, before I got on to my frustration with office socialisation, I was going to get into the various confrontations one has with image when one is a woman on a motorcycle, but it's past midnight and I need sleep. This is the problem with composing straight into Blogger...

Thursday, July 13, 2006

A lack of road rage

As everyone who will read this already knows, I ride a motorcycle, and I don't own a car. Which means I ride a motorcycle in winter.

This is relevant, because I think it's connected to the increase in motorists doing really stupid things that threaten to involve me in accidents. Motorcycles in winter aren't that common; I see a tiny fraction of the number of other bikes on the road that I see in summer, and believe me, I notice motorcycles on the road if they're there, because I'm looking for them. I love motorbikes and I love seeing them.

So, today.

I had somewhere to be. On the way, a car pulled out from a side road directly in front of me. I had to brake sharply, and beep my little horn at the driver. For some reason I always beep three times, one long, two short. I did that today, and a number of highly uncomplimentary thoughts about the driver crossed my mind. As I often do, I fantasised momentarily about yelling at him for it. I always want to because I want drivers to be made aware of what they nearly did, and I never do it, because I'm not a huge fan of confrontation.

(No, really. Once I'm in an argument with someone I'll get into it and I'll want to win it, but I don't look for one.)

Not far beyond the point where this happened, there was a red light. Couple of cars queued in each lane. Being on a motorbike and all, I went between the lanes to go to the front.

I could see from behind that the driver of the car that pulled out in front of me had his window open, and it occurred to me that if I wanted to tell him off I could; he'd hear me, I could say some choice words and move on ahead of him. If ever I had an opportunity to hurl abuse at someone without giving them the chance of riposte, this was it.

I wouldn't do it, but it was a nice thought.

Then I went past the car.

I glanced down at the driver as I idled past. If he could have seen my face he would have seen I was glaring mildly until I saw him, but between helmet and my big giant sunglasses my face isn't really visible when I'm riding in daylight. So all he saw was the helmet turn towards him briefly and then I was past.

I saw him, through his open window.

He was an older gent, maybe seventy, wearing a tan suit. And he was hunching down and away with his shoulders at the same time as he was looking up at me with an expression that mingled guilt and fear and shame, and I felt terrible.

He did know what he'd done, and what the consequences could have been. He knew that he could have hurt me, could have killed me, and that I'd probably be angry, and he was afraid of my rage. He was old. I'm not. I could hurt him. I wouldn't - even more than I wouldn't, in general, assault someone, we're up against the thing where I tend to like old people - but he didn't know that, and I felt awful for his fear when he'd just not seen me.

The trouble, of course, being that a small error on his part, in the scale of it being quite easy to do, can have big giant consequences for me; we were both lucky that it happened well within the margin where my observation that he was there and general constant preparedness for something like this to happen meant that I reacted carefully and there wasn't any kind of accident, but if he'd pulled out two seconds later it would perhaps have been a very different matter.

But the real epiphany, for me, was that road rage is worse than pointless.

Let's say I'd hurled abuse at him. Shouted what I'd thought: "Look before you pull out, you moron! You could have killed me! You idiot!"

Well. In the case of the driver who'd done it, it would have heaped aggression and insult and demeaning insults on someone who didn't need that. He knew he'd made a mistake and one that could have been serious. He already felt bad enough.

Had he been the kind of driver who never sees himself as being the one in the wrong, it just would have certified his view that obviously I was a dangerous lunatic. Or it may not even have become that rational, he'd just throw that aggression back at me. Still no benefit to be had for anyone.

It's not really a novel idea that rage and abusive behaviour are non-productive, but it's something I've been thinking about today. Because I can still see that old man shying away from the window of his car, looking guilty and afraid and ashamed, and I hate that image. I can't help but think that if this weren't a world where people are afraid of other drivers' road rage, he'd have looked apologetic and guilty but he wouldn't have had to retreat bodily from someone passing his car window, just apologised to me through it.

I would have been okay with that.