The other day my crew was called to take a bunch of big broken and decayed limbs out of the top of an old locust tree in front of a local community center. The center takes care of people with mental and physical disabilities, and many of them are in pretty bad shape. The path in front of it connects two campuses of a large university, so the traffic is about 70% students and the rest, disabled people going into the center. We set large bright orange safety cones all around the area we planned to drop the limbs, making sure people had a path to get around. My foreman stayed on the ground to keep people out of the area, and I went up and started cutting. Just as I got ready to drop about sixty pounds of wood into the target area, class let out somewhere, and students started flooding down the path, right through our cones. My foreman yelled at them to go around while waving his arms, and maybe two listened. The rest were too busy text messaging, listening to ipods, talking on the phone, flirting, or just staring at the ground to be bothered, and plowed right through. None ever looked up to see the branch suspended over their heads forty feet up. At the same time, several individuals, clearly severely handicapped, came down the path and approached the building entrance. Each one of them, in turn: 1) saw the cones 2) looked up in the tree 3) went around the cones. Even after the classes changed there was still steady traffic on the path from both groups, and the previous scenario went on, verbatim, for two and a half hours (and the job should have taken 45 minutes). Not one college student avoided the work area of their own accord, and not one single handicapped person entered it. For my part, there was only one group of people there that the term "retarded" applied to.
I'm not sure it's cell phones that caused the problem there. It's simply the "don't give a s**t attitude of our youth. Bunch of punks now-a-days if you ask my synacle view...
I liked this story a lot actually, told it to a bunch of people at work, they liked it too. Thanks for sharing.
Some people are just crazy.. Its like they don't care about themselves at all. Reminds me of how often I am reversing my car (ie. actually moving) and some idiot walks right behind me and I have to break to stop hitting them. I got frustrated the other night and yelled at someone for doing that, not realising me window was down so they very clearly heard me. Woops.
Haha! I think you should have kept hitting him...over and over and over again! Haha! Just kidding Strewart, but I feel your sympathy.
I certainly would, but I don't want more blood to mess up my nice little car. And don't even get me started on some of the stupid stuff cyclists do here. Grrrr
The underlying cause behind all of these symptoms, is the lost art of solitude. Nobody understands that it is important to learn how to be alone. No more just enjoying your walk between classes, now you have to be fiddling with your mobile device of choice. Waiting in line? Don't bother even looking at the people next to you, just pull out your mobile device. People are simultaneously more connected than ever, while becoming dangerously antisocial. Why bother associating with people in your immediate area when you are always only a text away from people you already know? If I were in the tree, looking down at the next generation's scholars with their electronic crutches, I'd probably have felt disgust. Here are a bunch of kids with the presumptive goal of bettering their understanding of the world, and yet they cannot (or worse, CHOOSE not) see more than a foot in front of their faces. I have witnessed this behavior in all areas of modern society. No longer capable of being independent assessors of the world around them, people have become enslaved to various forms of informational infrastructure, but that is a rant for another time! Just remember, when the lights go out, the so called "mental patients" will be better equipped to survive than the "normal folk", who will mill about waiting for their phones to turn back on and tell them what to do.
Caneghem, you've nailed something on the head there. Attention span and memory development is taking a nose dive. Who needs to learn to sit still for 10 minutes when you jump on the computer, Google something in 5 seconds, and have an answer. For that matter, why bother memorizing anything? Working in a school has made me hyper-aware of this issue. There are constant teacher meetings trying to fix this, since expecting children these days to pay attention to one subject for not even an hour is way too much. --DF2K
Though I'm not a promoter for this usually, I think if all our youth had some form of military or paramilitary training it would go a long way to improving their general attitude. Learning to pay attention to orders and what elders tell them, to accept authority and to accept what they take for granted.
I use the quote in my signature against you in this thread! (while simultaneously sharing some irony!)
He has a tendancy to do that! And most mentally disabled people have sound thinking patterns. Its just one flaw which makes them off the 'norm' eg Asbergess (sp?) Try reading the 'Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time' for an insight Or spent times on community work. Really worth it. Lloyd