You Are a Waste of Space

Do you remember those clever signs on the Washington Metro that were made up words with fake definitions as public service announcements? My favorite was “escalump: n. a person who becomes a human speed bump by suddenly stopping at the top or bottom of Metro escalators.” Apparently the mass transit officials in town felt that not stopping to check your watch at the bottom of a crowded escalator was such an underappreciated social norm that they had to alert people to the proper way to ride a moving staircase (it really boils down to walk, stand there, walk again). If it were any easier a child could do it…wait…children can do it, which leaves you on very thin ice.

I have to say that I think this sign is very unfair to speed bumps. At least they help to slow traffic on dangerous roads and do not waste precious resources like air and food as do the humanoid forms of social detritus that we’re discussing here. It seems like any place that serves as a choke point is also a magnet for gatherings of the self-absorbed and oblivious. We saw a version of this when discussing our clogged city sidewalks. The same is true of a crowded restaurant entryway. By all means, please finish picking the broccoli out of your teeth and dumping the bowl of mints into your purse before moving your recently expanded waistlines out from between me and my three hours worth of complementary dinner rolls.

But we see this problem in other places as well. We’ve all seen the i-bankers so absorbed in conversation that they have to stop just outside the main entrance of a 50 story office building to finish sharing their brilliant insights into the role of agricultural commodities in their getting hammered at the bar in 20 minutes. It’s almost as if the further they get from the building, the dumber they become so they have to drop all of their impressive knowledge within a 5 foot radius of the front door. This theory makes sense given how dumb they seem to be by the time they get to the bar.

We also see a strange phenomenon in revolving doors. Turns out, there is some mechanism placed just inside the center pole that causes cell phones to ring only once, maybe twice at most. This is evidenced by the fact that no matter where a person is in the process of walking forward while also possibly pushing the door, he or she feels a keen sense of urgency about fumbling through every pocket on every garment on his or her person to answer the phone. “Logjam be damned, this could be Ed McMahon and if I don’t catch this by the second ring, I’ll never forgive myself.” Of course, the odds of it being Ed McMahon, or even a worthwhile long distance offer, are about as good as you using the word logjam, making the discounted, risk-adjusted value of this phone call about half a cent. So let’s make a deal. I’ll pay everyone a penny to just let it ring until they get through the door. You get some positive NPV out of the deal and I get a decent shot at putting my groceries away before the plastic bag handles sever the finger I would need to effectively communicate with you.