On shopping trips, I try to remain vigilant against people rushing by on the right and careening around as if they’re in races to save the world from nuclear Armageddon. Judging by how many people race around here, there seem to be a lot of villains, spies, secret agents and superheros in my town. I try not to hinder or delay any life or death missions, but there are too many to catch them all. Just the other day, I was trying to be aware of others when a sign to the right caught my eye. As I slowed down to look more carefully, the person behind came right up to my behind and commenced to honking out some awful curses. Then, as they passed to my left, they stuck a middle finger up right in my face, and cursed me some more before challenging me to take a good 10 minute beating for the precious seconds they lost due to my inattentiveness to their critical emergencies. Being too simple to fathom the unimaginable stress that compels aspiring heroes to fight for every precious second, while also further allocating exceedingly rare minutes of that fleeting time to put a good beating on those who learn too slowly, I want nothing more in those moments than to get out of the way and beg forgiveness for delaying yet another one or our town’s growing number of virtue warriors embroiled in seemingly unending critical crunches. Somehow, through unbelievable skill and sheer will, this particular crazed traveler managed to get past me. I breathed a sigh of relief and continued on my way. Amazingly, my fellow traveler and superhero on a mission from god slowed down just ahead of me at the mayonnaise. A queue of rushing questers pressing my 6 o’clock kept me from seeing just exactly what the critical situation was at the mayonnaise, so I continued down the condiment aisle in my mundane search for relish without corn syrup. As I passed the mayonnaise champion, they were too engrossed in vitally important brand decisions to notice, much less acknowledge, my presence. Must have been terribly important. Did somebody slip polonium in the Hellmann’s again?
This parody was written to illustrate the crazy dichotomy in road manners and store manners.
On the one hand, it will be nice if we can get more grocery store manners on the road. On the other, road manners taking over our grocery stores may be a checkpoint on the path to the apocalypse.