Thursday, March 20, 2008

Talkin' about Revolution

Sometimes I feel like I'm in the spin-cycle of WTF. (Yes, we all know what that means, and I spelling it out would be inappropriate. You can say it out loud in your own head, but then who would be the potty mouth?) :) There are days when everywhere I look I discover something that makes me ask the quasi-rhetorical question of "WTF?" But I digress.....

There is a woman who frequents our little slug line, and she is either campaigning to be "Ruler of the Free World," "Captain of the Safety Patrol," or "Supreme Line Leader." I'm thinking she'll take any of the above positions should they be offered to her.

Unfortunately for us all, she goes to one of those locations that doesn't get a lot of traffic, so she's generally in line for a long time. And she screws up EVERYTHING!!!! In some cases, her "input" has almost gotten people steamrolled by confused drivers.

Recently, I arrived on the Grey Mile, and she was positioned roughly in the upper-middle part of the line. She has the ability to make her voice carry long distances, much to the despair of my one remaining good ear, and she likes to call out the drivers' requests. She gets so carried away that she starts to call them out incorrectly, especially when the cars start to stack up. For example, someone will pull up and call out "Pentagon." She will yell out "Pentagon" and if nobody responds before the next car pulls up and calls out "L'Enfant" she will start to get confused. I don't know if she's ADHD or just not capable of multitasking, but she starts to confuse the locations. The results are people wandering up to cars they shouldn't be getting into and then jumping back out when they realize they are in the wrong car. In the meantime, someone behind that person has taken their ride from them because they were lucky enough to figure it out first. People are hopping in and out of line, and it's TOTAL mass confusion. At one point, she was pointing people to cars and telling them to hurry up. She's yelling at other cars to move up as people are crossing in front of them. For SOME reason, our line is predominantly populated by lemmings because they are blindly following this lady's "directions."

I am going to run with the theory that she was either denied a position in the safety patrol in elementary school or she lost several elections for class president in high school.

Lucky for me, I'm developing my own little reliable "clique" of riders and drivers, and we all look out for each other. We basically use hand signals and codes to coordinate our ride sequence. I, former safety patrol member and elected student government official, have created a well-oiled process for moving riders and drivers through our line for our particular destination without the input of this disorganized scatter-brain. We all sort of giggle when she tries to intervene. Everyone else can have her.

Right now, our little sluglot runs itself without official governance. As our Founding Fathers reminded us, bad government is not a viable alternative to anarchy. Right now, our lot is facing anarchy as a result of bad government. Madame Line Leader, may I suggest you back off and mind your business before you face a revolution you can't handle!

Viva la sluglot!

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