Living where I do there are lots of steep hills & narrow roads with roadside parking. I think if I am driving uphill I have priority & oncoming traffic is supposed to give way. That's what I do anyway & I acknowledge people who give way to me. I am constantly surprised that other drivers ignore this polite rule & don't bother to wave in thanks when I let them pass. I'm infuriated when I am labouring uphill & a driver, often of a 4x4 or big car, drives straight at me downhill.
Ditto, when there is not enough room for 2 cars side by side, drivers who keep coming, when if they just reversed a short distance, could allow me to pass. So I end up reversing for a much longer distance & have scraped my car on the cotswold stone walls several times.
I am sorely tempted to just replicate their bad behaviour & keep going. I have done this very occasionally when it is very blatant, but been subjected to a torrent of verbal abuse.
I'm also getting so fed up with floods of nuisance calls, that I'm breaking the habit of a lifetime & being very curt & rude. Mostly these calls are "international", so you know what's coming if you don't have lots of foreign calls. But now there are also "witheld" callers, so you don't know if they are bona fide. You can't use call barring for international calls - why not? You have to respond to witheld calls because they may be genuine. I'm tempted to have a piercing whistle next to the phone to use once I've established who the caller is.
There is something about having your personal space invaded, whether it's real or rhetorical which is very annoying. There are barriers which other people should not cross unless invited.
I had a phone call yesterday from a wine company & the script obviously called for the caller to use my christian name ridiculously regularly. I didn't solicit the call, I wasn't interested in buying the product & I didn't know him or want to. This made me very averse to the company, who I have bought wine from once before. So their marketing has had completely the opposite effect to what they wanted, which was to drum up sales.
There is a tiger within me & one day it will get out & I will completely lose it. So beware!
Can't give guidance on poor road manners but why not get a simple answerphone to screen those foreign or recorded-message calls?
ReplyDeleteYou may get, as I do sometimes, as many as ten calls a day but I don't have to listen to the whole message before pressing 'delete'!
Thanks. I do have an answerphone. The problem is I'm here most of the time and if the phone rings I answer it - Pavlov's dog! The nuisance is the unsolicited ringing,disturbing whatever you are doing,not the actual call.
ReplyDelete