Ninety eight percent of the time, I’m the slowest guy on the sidewalk. People walking with me hate me for it, but I can’t help it — I’ve always been a bit of an ambler. One of the only exceptions to this rule is when I’m in the subway or airport; something about wanting to get to the gate or the business lounge makes me come full circle around the spectrum and nearly sprint to my destination.
In that case, I’m frequently dodging around tourists and slow walkers, telepathically trying to push them out of my way so I can get past.
This used to bother me. Why are these people stopping in the center of the sidewalk? Why are they standing on the left side of the escalator? Completely unacceptable.
Well, apparently I’m not the only person who is (or was) bothered by this. A few months back, perusing a friend’s Facebook account I saw that he was a member of the group “I Secretly Want to Punch Slow Walking People in the Back of the Head.”
There are 712,085 members. I had no idea that people got that fired up about it.
Since browsing the ranks of that group, I’ve slowly grown forgiving of the slow walkers in front of me during my travels. Perhaps because I know I’m sometimes a perpetrator myself; perhaps because I didn’t realize how intense some people were about it.
But I still keep to the right on the escalator.