Convenience

--Robert Langellier

I have never been known to go out of my way to do things when they can be done more conveniently by inconveniencing others. But I am not the issue here. My issue is people who allow me to inconvenience them.

I’m sitting my table at Plaza 900 enjoying a nice lunch with a couple friends. Plaza 900 is great because, not only is it a thousand mile walk away to successfully burn off all calories and nutrients consumed there, but the food selection is humongous and, for a college mess hall, absolutely delicious. Sadly, my stomach was cursed at birth with tissue walls, meaning I can only inhale so many Fruity Pebble patty melts before I have to give up and wait another 5 hours to start over again. After a quick prayer to Demeter, goddess of the Freshman Fifteen, I stand up to dump my spoils onto the tray conveyor belt.

With the way the system works, you take your tray, go in through the “In” end, place your tray on the belt, and leave out the “Out” end in a neat and orderly fashion. I didn’t have time for this. I had seconds to shave off my exit strategy and people to inconvenience, so I turned a quick 180 off the tray deposit and hurtled out the “In” door. My acceleration was magnificent and unstoppable, except by the girl’s body right behind me. In a high speed P2P fender bender I grazed her shoulder, moving her slightly off-balance. As any good citizen should do, she apologized to me and bowed her head, effectively confusing the shit out of me.

Obviously, I command respect. There must be something in my smooth posture, or my generally aloof gaze, or my awkwardly long neck that brought fear to this girl. She clearly wanted nothing to do with my dominating presence and arrogant disrespect of those around me, and her pupils slammed to the ground like there was a puppet show on the floor tile. Or perhaps she was rewarding my nonconformity with absolute submission. Either way, I’m a little mad I didn’t knock her tray down afterward, just to see what would happen (probably fainting or a date offering, judging by my knowledge of her past reactions). I haven’t yet pinpointed which superior quality of mine it is that defeated her, so my only hope was that this was a repeatable attack.

I began turning my ruse into a hilarious game. I would bump into an oncoming pedestrian, recoil, squint my eyes and mutter, “Fuck!” like I had a bad case of contact-induced Tourette's. Had I been in a college of 6th graders, I certainly (and rightly) would have been the funniest boy on campus, but instead I was just a jackass teenager in obvious need of an apology for the failure of those around me to get the fuck out of my way. Of course it worked.

I eventually started learning that social respect (or maybe just social victory) is birthed from completely not giving a fuck. For the most part, the average person seems to have resigned himself to avoiding all conflict or slight inquiry by any means necessary. When that crowd of upperclassmen is coming at you on the sidewalk, why not slip through those 6 inches of space between the parking meter and the curb to let them through? Or if Kitty Genovese is getting stabbed on the street down below, why intervene when the safety of the TV’s volume button is aching to be bumped? People love being convenient way more than they like being winners. Bullying (winning) couldn’t be easier.

This really inconveniences my ideals. Our flight instincts are much more developed than our fighting ones. We’re very good at ducking under the social covers. Truth be told, it’s sort of annoying to be apologized to when, to anybody with a functional brain, nobody is at fault except perhaps the receiver of the apology. “Sorry” often no longer means “sorry,” but instead “please relegate your path of destruction somewhere else.” Hell no. I will continue bowling over the weak until someone who isn’t completely jacked stops me. My utter domination of my peers is not due to a conquering spirit, but to a frustration with a system of conflict avoidance. I don’t care from whom, but I demand an apology for that.