Not mine, of course, but an observation about those around me. . . as always. It may be that this is a nation-wide epidemic, but I don't recall it happening so much when I was back in the midwest. So I'll chalk it up to uppity people here, and the fact that they think that they are entitled to . . . well, everything. It's a strange sort of attitude that I've seen becoming more and more prevalent.


Example 1: The Drive-thru

I am behind a woman in the drive-thru line at a major fast food vendor. I am patiently waiting as she gives her order. The order-taker must have been mistaken, because as she repeated the order, the woman in the car ahead of me starts getting frustrated "No, I said a number 13 with CURLY fries, a chocolate shake, an order of extra fries, three cheeseburgers and ..." and on and on. She repeats the order loudly, quickly and with obvious anger. The order taker repeats the order again, and again it's wrong. No doubt I would be a bit frustrated at this point, but the woman continues to swear and scream at the little speaker. This time, she specifies grilled chicken, when previously she had not. . . and adds things to the order that she had not said the first time. Or the second time. At this point, I hear a child crying in the car as well. Fantastic. Not only is she being a giant bad-word to some poor person on the other side of that speaker, but she'd doing it with a child in the car.

At last, the order taker has got everything that the crazy person has ordered, and she pulls away, squealing the tires (IN THE DRIVE THRU!!!) and stops short up at the window. As I place my order I can hear her continuing to scream -- both thanks to the speaker and the fact that my window is open -- at the poor girl at the window who is trying to take my order and ignore the woman in the car. I pull around after ordering without a problem, and wait behind the psychotic woman who has now taken to talking to herself about how awful the service is here. . . and they'd better have her ing food right or she's going to talk to the ing manager. As if that would get her any sort of sympathy. She's lucky she got her food at all, as Nevada businesses have the right to refuse service to any one at any time for any reason. She would definitely be a reason. But she gets her food, tosses money at the girl at the window and snatches her change back... and proceeds to stay there, at the window and check every article of food in the bag to make sure the ing got her food right. Lovely.

Example 2: A day at the park

I am with my friends, Kat and her boyfriend, enjoying a nice evening at the park, barbecueing and generally having a good time. We have three dogs with us, all well-behaved and staying near our table (mostly for hand-outs). They are also very keen on chasing their tennis ball when it's thrown. Soon, a man and his son come to the nearby baseball field for a little batting practice. They have a bucket full of balls and are hitting them into the outfield (mostly), which is far off to the left of our little 'camp.' We are purposely throwing the tennis ball far to the right. Every now and then, one of their balls comes zinging toward us, usually without incident. No problem. Foul balls happen, and this is obivously why they are practicing. We call the dogs away when they start to get at the baseballs and throw the tennis ball to distract them/give them food/play with them as any people would play with their dogs. Well, the food is being eaten and we're conversing, so obviously we're not being militant about policing the dogs and for the most part, as I stated before, they're staying near and not bothering to go even close to the baseball field or the two people there.

All of a sudden we hear yelling and whistling... and angry tones. One of the dogs has picked up the man's baseball and is playing with it. Understandably, the guy doesn't want slobber all over his ball, we can get with that. He does not, however, approach us. Instead, he yells at the dogs and starts muttering about us. Fantastic. What an . His overreaction was just the beginning, though. As dogs are wont to do, they would now-and-then pick up a ball that was not theirs, and we would tell them to leave it alone. Of course they did, as they're well-trained dogs, and would go about playing until another ball whizzed by and they went racing after it. All three dogs are hunting/herding breeds. . . what else do you expect. But the man isn't that forgiving and tells us to keep our dogs away from his away from his ing balls. At this point, he's hit all the balls in his bucket and is collecting them. It's mostly dark and he keeps eyeing us and the dogs. They're playing with their tennis ball now and he calls out for us to give him his ball back. We make sure to tell him that it's not his ball....and he just huffs and struts around, picking up balls and muttering about us.

About these two examples:

Both embody an obvious attitude of entitlement that horrifies me. The gentleman at the park went way past indignation. He strutted around the park like he owned it, he harrassed the dogs, he made life generally miserable for us while we were attempting to enjoy a nice summer evening. We may have encroached minutely on his own enjoyment, but if it was really bothering him that much, he could have moved his little pitching session to any of the other FOUR baseball diamonds in the park. Instead, he insisted on staying there, where he knew that there was a chance that the dogs might have grabbed up the balls and slobbered them. They weren't chewing them, either. They were just slobbering them.

And, just as the woman in the drive-thru was doing, he was teaching his child this selfish, 'entitled' sort of attitude toward the whole situation. Maybe he was in the right, though I don't really think that can be argued, but even if he was, he had no right to yell at the dogs, grumble about us, and ruin our evening. There are several ways that we could have mitigated this, but he seemed content to stoke the fire. If anything, I could play the 'we were here first' card and complain that he was encroaching on our good time and limiting the activities we were enjoying, instead of our dogs impeding his enjoyment. (P.S., his kid was awful at baseball and looked like he wanted to murder someone when his dad started yelling at us. Two guesses whose head he wanted to swing the bat at worse)

The woman in the drive-thru believed with every fiber of her being that it was her right to scream obscenities at the poor girl at the window. She didn't see a problem with losing her temper after a small misunderstanding which may or may not have been her fault (or caused by a language barrier, I'm not sure) . . . She blamed all the things going wrong with this communication breakdown on the other person, even after she had blatantly repeated things differently and changed her mind in the middle of the order. She didn't hesitate to treat another human being (who happened to be in charge of feeding she and her child -- note.... don't ever mess with people who handle your food. That's just a bad idea to begin with) like she was better than the employee. What right does anyone have to treat anyone else like that? Fast food employee or not, that person is a human being and is working to feed themselves and possibly others. They may not have marketable skills enough to perform another job, but they are a contributing member of this community and society and believe me, I have seen this many other times. Every place I have served (and most especially here on the West Coast), I have seen this sense of entitlement. . . this "down your nose, holier than thou" attitude and it sickens me. Everyone who has never worked in any sort of food service establishment should have to both cook and work the front of the house at least once in their life. . . to see just how awful people can be to those who think they're better because they can deny you the opportunity to break into making minnimum wage that day. End tangent.

This woman is not only clueless about the food service industry, she's a hypocritical, wicked person. She thought it was all right to use racial slurs and curse words. . . but not only that, she was saying those horrible things in front of her child. Logic dictates, then, that she wouldn't hesitate to allow her child say such things. No? Well, surely if she wouldn't want her child to such things . . . why on earth would she say them in front of her child?

So I suppose my question to the general public is this:

Who the hell do you think you are?