The rude loop....

I'll tell you something which is not very fun:

Finding a spot to park your car in sub-tropical Australia when your air conditioner is busted.

This activity is particularly traumatic at the frenzied peak of the Christmas buying-season.

Doing so has been known to drive people to violence, as I saw for myself the other day.

Before I get to the grisly details, I better introduce myself. I'm Greta, an aussie mum. I'm, you know, nice and stuff.

I don't live in a one-horse town, but it's definitely no more than a two-horse town. Like most modern two-horse towns, it has two shopping precincts - the 'old' one, and the
'new' one.

The 'old' shopping centre is like a ghost-town. Dilapidated with flickering, grubby flourescent lighting and perpetual scuff-marks on the linoleum, 'the old place' is now mainly frequented by coin-counting old folk, and families who are willing to put up with the dinge to save a few dollars. There are shops in there which are not franchises, and they are not doing very well these days.

People who consider shopping to be a weekly event to buy groceries tend to go there. I call these people 'functional shoppers.'

There aren't many of these people in my modern two-horse town. Shopping is considered a hobby here. Like it has in many parts of the developed world, I suppose.

That is why the 'old place' has been eclipsed by a flouro wonderland: the 'new place.'

Crammed with teen boutiques and food franchises of every description, and with careful, directed lighting to give everything a vivid colour and sheen, 'the new place' is for all the truly dedicated shoppers. It is very popular, and often crowded.

I absolutely hate 'the new place.'

Most of the time I shop at the 'old place' out of some weird compulsion to support the 'underdog,' even though I know it is really another supermarket from the same company. However, recently I went to the 'new place' to get a seventeen-dollar photo of my son almost crying with terror on 'Santa's' lap.

Waiting in the queue for 30 minutes, I listened to the mothers battling to keep their kids neat and still. I heard parents snapping at their terrified kids to smile and look happy as they sat for a 'happy-snap' with Santa Claus.

There were raised voices and tears all around. I remember one little boy in particular. He was so terrified of Santa that he was screaming to the rafters as soon as his mother took his hand to lead him in. Snot was flying from his nose, his eyes were streaming tears. He kept trying to bolt, his eyes desperately scanning the tinselly enclosure for a place to escape. His eyes reminded me of a horse in a thunderstorm, hooves raised, about to bolt.

His harried mother interpreted his terror as 'naughtiness.' How dare he ruin her happy snap? Aunt Gladys would be SO disappointed.

"Cooper, stop that at once, you're being silly," she snapped. She looked like she was on the verge of smacking him. Cooper was crying so hard that he vomited all over Santa. A frayed-looking woman in an elf costume tried to allay Cooper's fears by waving rubber duckies and honking toys in front of him.

I know when I'm terrified to the point of vomiting, it REALLY helps when people wave a rubber duckie at me. I hope that Elf gets a Christmas bonus. She sure deserves it.

Finally, Cooper calmed down enough to stop crying - audibly, at least. No amount of duckie-squeaking was going to get a smile out of him.

Merry Freakin' Christmas, I thought.

Why didn't I just wait until I could get a free photo with Santa at the library Christmas party? I thought.

Bah, humbug, I thought.

I noticed a palette of coca-cola cartons, marked down from fourteen dollars to eleven. Cartons of coke were stacked to eye-level. There were probably more than a hundred cartons there. I should have counted them when the palette was first wheeled out. At any rate, there was a lot of coke there. By the time we got to the front of the line, there were only two layers left.

Doing a quick calculation, I estimated that of about a hundred cartons, eighty of them sold in a half an hour. If each carton contained ten cans of coke, then about 800 cans of coke were sold in the time it took for me to get to the front of the line.

Hmmmm.

This little story gives a pretty good indication of the kind of place it is. Perhaps this is such a universal theme that I did not need to illustrate with a story.

A shopping centre is a shopping centre is a shopping centre. No explanation needed.

So, anyway.

Recently, I thought I'd pop in and grab some cherry tomatoes for my child to eat. I have no idea why I decided to go to the 'new place,' but half an hour later, I found myself caught in a labyrinth of beeping cars and no way to get out. We were literally trapped in there, because the exits were blocked by incoming and turning traffic. Nobody was getting a park. Everyone had angry faces. I saw mothers with contorted faces, screaming at their howling kids in the back of the car.

Which brings me to my theory about the 'rude-loop.' I believe some people are caught in a perpetual loop of rudeness that they cannot escape. Let's call them the 'rude-loopers,' because it sounds cool.

What happens is this: One morning, for whatever reason, these 'rude-loopers' wake up crabby. This is where it all begins. Maybe they got out of the wrong side of the bed, or thy cooked their eggs wrong, or they had a rough childhood. The reason is not important.

So, the 'rude-looper' wakes up crabby. People are such assholes, he thinks to himself.

Then somebody gives her the wrong change, or looks at her in a funny way. Angered by this, the 'rude-looper' snaps and glares.

None of us react well when somebody is rude to us.

If we have emotional maturity, we may be able to dismiss their rudeness and pity them, but mostly, we're cranky back, or we are hurt and take it personally. I think it's fair to say, though, that most victims of crabbiness will get crabby back.

So, having been rude to others, the 'rude-looper' receives rudeness in return. This further enforces the rude-looper's idea that people are assholes. To counteract this, he becomes ruder. Which causes further reciprocal rudeness. And so it goes, on and on.

This continues in a perpetual loop, until the rude-looper is convinced that the world is full of rude, horrid people. So she become trapped in a world of her own creation, where everybody is rude and unpleasant.

The number of people caught in this loop increases at Christmas and other holidays.

TO BE CONTINUED