Selfish people

Is there any common courtesy left in people these days? I seriously wonder about this more and more. I think selfishness has hit an all time high of late, or maybe I'm just getting crabby about people being idiots...most likely it's a little of both, but yesterday I was starting to hit my limit.

Since it was Sunday and Deirdre and I had no other plans we decided to take advantage of the museum pass that she had given me for Christmas. So we made the trip to the Minnesota Science Museum to see what they had to offer. After standing in line for quite some time, and noticing all the kids running around (damn there were a lot of them) we finally made it into the museum. We decided to first check out the dinosaur exhibit, the life size pteranodon was rather inspiring as it hung over-head at the entrance of the museum.

Well the first lovely encounter with rudeness came at the first display on the floor. We were standing a foot or two away from the glass case around a simulated Mars Rover, when a rather chunky child walked right between us and the case, obscuring the view completely from me. Now remember folks, I'm six-foot-two, it's hard to hide anything from me with your body, particularly something the size of a Mars Rover, but this kid managed to do it really well. The little (or large) bastard just stood there while his parents were going to the elevator, he never even noticed that we had been there and that he was blocking the view.

There were plenty of other instances of kids just not being watched by their parents, or even worse, the parents were doing little to nothing to prevent their children from getting in others way. It's oh so much fun when you are trying to use a weather experiment and some kid drags his mom over and starts hitting buttons...you would think that there would be some kind of mention from the parent to acknowledge those who were there first...I guess not. Or maybe you shouldn't let you kid climb all over the ping-pong ball shooter. Sure it's designed to be used by kids to fire the balls up into a series of funneled nets, but does your kid really need to be climbing all over the base of the thing? And just maybe, if your kid can stand, but not see over my knee, maybe you should keep an eye on her, just a thought. Though I'm sure letting her trail around ten feet behind you is a sign of being a good parent.

So after being there for only about an hour and half we realized that my pass will get us in at any time and it was probably an opportune moment to make a break for it. There are only so many reminders of why I don't want to have kids that I can stand in one day.

No finally here's a little tip for those of you who are in a parking garage. If you see a car coming at you don't continue to stand in its lane, with you small child, talking to some bozo in a massive SUV for minutes. There are other people in the world and they have places to go, the longer you stand there impeding their progress the sooner they are going to revert to basic animal instincts and realize that you are useless to them and need to be crushed.

And one last little piece of advice. Those of you who drive mini vans, just because they are slightly smaller than the latest crop of SUVs (I swear the only vehicles in the museum parking garage were mini vans and SUVs) and contain the cute name "mini" in the name, they do not qualify as a "compact car". So don't bloody well park in the spot clearly marked with foot high letters reading "Compact Cars Only".