Grand Central Stagnation
It’s a bit of a paradox, really: I rave about keeping people out of my way, as I stay out of theirs. We’re talking both walking on the street and methodologically, too. Leave me alone and the favor will be returned. But in this blog, I attempt to entertain and maybe to teach, which is only possible when I interact with people’s thoughts directly, when you read and there’s a meeting of our minds. No big deal. Thought I’d point it out.
I write this prologue, and this forthcoming example, to illustrate the fact that I’m not a just a pompous jerk, that I’m also considerate. At the train station, I most often buy tickets at one of the touch-screen ticket machines that accept ATM or credit cards. Right there, I’m cutting down the lines at the tickets booths with human sellers. I also take great pride in the fact that, from start to finish, I can purchase a ticket from a machine in just about 10 seconds (depending on how long it takes to approve my card). I know how busy everyone is, and what a rush it is around dinnertime at the station, so I get what I need and scram, duck and cover. And let the next person go, whoever he or she is.
Occasionally, though, I find myself embedded in a phalanx of, shall we say, red-state tunnel dwellers — the kind of people who are comfortable underground, be it in a subway or in their bomb shelter. Don’t get me wrong, I do love the South, steaks, line-dancing and the mouth-harp; I just disdain the lack of sensibility on these patrons’ parts to use a ticket machine, which is utterly foreign to them, instead of talking with a real person at a ticket booth, when their hometown has but one recently-installed stoplight and they become wide-eyed at anything EE-leck-tronic.
