People

...are stupid. A person may be smart, but people are stupid. So says me. Feel free to disagree, but you're wrong. ;-)

Just take any random sampling of people, say the people you'll see in eight hours if you hang out at a grocery store (the time and setting are of course chosen randomly in my example!). The sheer amount of stupidity, selfishness, and orneriness (defined quite aptly by WordWeb as "Meanspirited disagreeable contrariness") that you'll see are enough to destroy any lingering belief in the inherent goodness of man.

When I arrived today I spotted a man that I've come to quite dislike over the past month or so. He is an older man, in his seventies or eighties. He comes in and wanders the lot just so he can pop quarters out of carts. Now as a carts employee I get to keep all of the quarters that I find. I understand that people will occasionally find an accessible cart with a quarter in it and will use it or pop the quarter out. The purely selfish part of me would prefer I be the only one to find these carts, but I understand it. On the other hand I take a very strong dislike to anyone deliberately driving to the store just to pop quarters from carts. They're not exactly like tips, but they're part of the reason I stick with this job. The extra money is nice!

Furthermore I'm convinced that the man knows exactly what he is doing and that it is wrong. If I'm out in the lot (I'm not allowed to kick him out because that was tried before and he produced a reciept proving he was a legitimate customer) and walk towards him he looks at me and walks away. If he thought he was doing nothing wrong he would keep going, regardless if I was near or far. He can't just be avoiding me because of what I've done to him because I've never done anything to him. From what I've heard and seen he basically drives to the store (or is dropped off) just to pick up quarters--and sometimes he buys lottery tickets with the quarters. He might shop, but not most times--he is just coming to "quarter poach."

I remember years ago I was at the Tucson airport with a younger cousin. For some reason we were outside for quite a while so we started returning luggage carts. You rented these carts for $1.25 I believe and if you returned them to the collection area you recieved one quarter back. My cousin and I were returning these carts and keeping the carts when some employees chased us off and told us to stop. At the time I couldn't understand it--but I get it now. They probably were used to collecting the carts and keeping the quarters--much as I do today.

Well, back to generalities. Many people will deliberately ignore me when I'm forming up a line of carts (usually 12-17) to pull in and will walk across the aisle to put their cart in an empty cart corral. 'Tis only a few nice people that ask if I want the extra cart. Then we have the people that cannot be bothered to put a cart in behind the other eight carts and instead put it on its own right beside them. I don't think people ever think about how the carts get back to the front of the store unless they're invonvenienced by me pulling a row. That is another problem--momentum.

When I pull rows in I have to gain momentum, otherwise I'd be bent over double the whole time with the effort. Stopping mid-trip and restarting isn't exactly an attractive option. Therefore I consider that I have the ultimate right-of-way because of the necessity of momentum. I figure I wouldn't wreck a car, but do you want to see what crashing into a row of carts would do to your car? Trust me, a row of 16 carts isn't light!

I think my favourite have to be the deaf and blind people. I sincerely mean no offence to those actually deaf and/or blind. I refer to those people that slowly take their time procuring a cart from the space where I need to pull my big long row. I have to stop my row of carts as I try to pull them into the corral and wait while they slowly put in the quarter, detach their cart, and eventually (emphasis on the length of time implicit in the word eventually) move into the store with it. I've even seen them pull some trash out of a cart (I don't always have time to remove it--especially if it is in a cart in the middle of a row and I'm pulling them in quickly to clear the lot) and just drop it on the ground right in front of me. Oh, but don't forget Lowes.

Our store is right next door to a Lowes home improvement store. We technically don't share the same parking lot as their plot is slightly lower than ours and separated by a wide planter. This however doesn't stop customers from bringing Lowes carts into our lot and then leaving them in our cart corrals. Obviously I have nothing better to do than return carts to the other lot. I've wondered what such people would do if I showed up at their work and deliberately made things tougher for them.

Now to be fair some of the complaints above I would never have fathomed before I started this job. However, the fact that these might apply to me doesn't change the facts. I'm also a member of the fallen human race and heir to the same general stupidity as everyone else. I think we should stop speaking of common sense. Our vocabulary should morph into "uncommon sense" and "common stupidity." This would be much more accurate! I never thought about some of these things before, but I should have. I might wish I'd had a better full-time job for a while now, but the things I've learned at UPS and bigg's have been quite valuable, such as how I'll treat carts whenever I'm shopping from now on.

~Matt