Peep Show

I paid zero dollars for this newspaper and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let some mooch read it over my shoulder for free. It’s not even so much the mooching that bothers me; I was probably going to just throw the thing nonchalantly on the ground after I was finished anyway. What really steams my milk is the invasion of personal space. At one level, I do not need all of your carbon dioxide and methane gas creating a thick smog right over my head. At a deeper level, how do I know you’re not going to shiv (see: shank) me? Lurking up behind a person to catch a glimpse of the latest Doonesbury cartoon is not worth the awkward standoff between us and our carefully sharpened sporks, I promise.

Also, let’s not forget the space invaders that come with instructions:
“Wait, I’m not finished with that page.”
“Hang on, scroll down to the bottom real quick.”
“Oh my gosh, I can’t believe you’re reading this filth.”

If I’m looking at something and I know you’re there, it means I have made a conscious decision not to talk to you. When you interject your two cents, you have not only broken the fourth wall that was so tenuously supporting my sanity in the first place, but also severed whatever loose thread of an idea was holding my reading material together, allowing me to learn something in the process of ignoring you. At least make it worth my while to have you ruin my day if you’re going to do this and share something enlightening. Usually though, people like to use a topical snippet from my reading material to drag me kicking and screaming into the social quicksand I was trying to avoid in the first place. “Speaking of the Pope, my mother had a bunion the size of my fist removed the other day.” And eureka, we’ve found something more noxious than your personal gas cloud.

Sticking your big bazzoo right behind a person’s head is also a safety hazard. If I were to read something hysterically funny and rear my head back with uproarious laughter, I might accidentally break your nose sending small pieces of shattered bone back into your brain where they would cause you to stop living. I would feel just awful if that happened and goodness knows I have enough guilt issues without pulling a Marsha Brady on your schnoz.

I think the biggest problem, though, is that your surreptitious spying is a proxy for behavior in which even you would be too embarrassed to engage. You would never walk up to a stranger and ask, “Hey, can I borrow your laptop real quick so I can check the box scores from last night’s baseball match?” But this is exactly what you’re doing when you sneak a peek in public. And lest you think I’m the only one getting all hot and bothered about this problem, the good folks at 3M (who brought you Post-It Notes, and Scotch Tape, and the letter M, and the number 3), also saw a social malady that needed a cure: http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/ComputerFilter/Home/. So I suggest you take a hint before I find a way to whittle a Command Hook into a throwing star.