Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Let's Do Some Good Gentlemen

Decided to work in the RMIT librqary yesterday as I had writing to do.

Got there and the place was in chaos. The computer lab was full and people were wandering around desperately looking for that person that was just leaving.

In KFC earlier (I am building up my fat deposits for the weekend half-marathon) I saw society at both it's best and worst.

Firstly queing, there were three counters open, one queue.

I think this is something truly moving about the human spirit.

Many a time have I looked over in frustration at a fast food joint because I managed to pick a queue that essentially was as long as any other except that someone up front had ordered a million dollars worth of food and I would end up watching the other queues drift by as my eyesight and lungs failed in my old age.

Yet with the beauty of the 'one queue' people get to order in the most orderly way possible. You simply stand in the one queue and the person in front of the queue goes to the first open counter.

SImple. Beautiful.

If the slovenly protoforms that make up KFC's clientelle can cooperate why can't the best and brightest RMIT students do so?

It seemed to me as I briefly surveyed the situation that an RMIT student will dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to fucking over their fellow students in an orgy of self interest.

I was surprised crips and bloods hadn't simply locked down whole sections of the lab for the exclusive use of their members.

People meandered around looking bewildered, giving eachother sidelong glasses. Staring daggers at eachother.

So I just went and leaned on the wall where the old queue used to be. And after a minute a bunch of people wound up standing behind me.

Then some guy got up off his computer and I went and logged on there.

There were bags of garbage sitting around the computer though, which I don't know why they'd do this in a computer lab. It's not like its KFC and for that matter.

When I was sitting at the restaurant known as KFC I must have been on the arse end of the lunch break because I found myself suddenly eating alone.

And I looked around and saw almost every table had empty trays and boxes of the remnants of meals sitting on them.

I mean sure, it's fucking KFC. But the effort required to just throw out your garbage in the flaps of the bin that say THANK YOU is quite minimal.

Do people smirk at those THANK YOU bins as the walk away leaving their greasy garbage in their wake.

How can people so capable of respecting eachother in their queuing behaviour just turn around and disrespect the staff ("clean up my greasy disgusting shit slave") or the diners of the future ("behold my greasy disgusting shit sitting on the table where you want to eat")

I don't get it colonel. I really don't want to blame foreigners but the most ready excuse I can think of is a cultural paradigm shift, of no personal responsibility. Consumers consume they don't clean up after themselves.

At any rate when I clocked off at 4.30 and got up the queue sustained by it's own momentum was still in effect and a relieved person thanked me for waving them over for the queue where they too could watch the student logged on to the computer next to me that abandoned it for 40 minutes at a time. What a fuckhead.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My friends made fun of me when I emptied my trays in McDonald's in Malaysia.

I think it's one of those 'we should let other people clean up our shit' Asian mentality.