The other day…

Wait.. which day was the other day?

I can’t remember.

Oh wait.

It was Sunday.

On Sunday, whilst making my way to Redfern from UNSW Library via bus, there was a point where I had to get off the bus in order to walk for about ten minutes.

It was the minimum amount of exercise that I was going to get to make sure that I felt good about the minimum amount of exercise that I was getting.

Anyway, I was on the bus with one of my university colleagues when the bus stopped at our stop. We were moving down the aisle of the bus to the exit and two people decided that the best thing to do was not really move at all.

The bus was fairly crowded but it really wasn’t hard to hop off to let other people off and then get back on the bus. It never is.

Aside from a slight token motion, they decided not to move at all so as to test how well my colleague and I could barge past people.

Apparently we’re really good at barging past people.

We pushed past and then they seemed a little surprised, as I imagine that it must be pretty surprising when people need to get off a bus and you don’t want to be nice by moving out of the way.

Something similar happened yesterday.

I was walking from work to Redfern. When I was near where I wanted to be, I saw two people were walking in the opposite direction. They were looking at their phones and not where they were going whilst also taking up the whole path. I had no room to move around them due to where I was positioned, I walked right into one of them and ended up unintentionally shoulder-charging that person.

Not expecting this, they ended up hitting the other person who was not looking at where they were walking. There was a half-hearted apology from the one that I walked into, but I didn’t respond as I didn’t care.

I think that there are more important things in the world than looking at your phone and not where you’re walking. Walking into someone isn’t the best thing to do in the world. Neither is getting run over because you’re not looking at where you’re going.

There’s also better things to do than obstruct people from getting off of public transport because you don’t seem to understand what being nice is for some reason, or you think that your ability to stand in a place is more important than allowing people to get on and off something.

I think that more people need to wake up to themselves. These are two small, minor experiences that are more common than they should be. You’d think that people would stop, but due to people seemingly deciding that being nice on a base level is hard, things like this on happening.

Courtesy: It’s not that hard.

The time it took to write five-hundred words: 09:52:36

Not too speedy, but still under ten minutes.

It’s probably not polite to walk into or push past people.
I still think that it’s acceptable if people are not going to bother.

Written at UNSW