Rudeness and people awareness

Ok this irritates the f*&k out of me and I've noticed it several times recently.

Tonight prime example. Waiting in line at the MVV ticket desk. Someone also "in line" (rather standing almost next to me) starts to annoy me for their proximity to me. Its my turn to go to the desk and this punk is so close his hand is resting on the same bloody counter I'm at. I turned round twice to make eye contact and stare, guy looks back, but next time I look he is still there. Second time I did it his chums shut up but that was it.

This really irritates me, and I couldnt think of anything witty enough to say other "can i help you?" so i just left it apart from the 2 stares.

About to walk off thinking that this is typical German behaviour then hear the guy gobbing off with an American accent.

Have been in pubs recently watching sport and some people can't seem to comprehend that in busy pubs its rude to move about/stand up and chat/ completely move your body as you've got a dozen or so people behind you all lined up trying to watch the same screen.

I'm really bored from being unwell and just lazing about so this will seem pedantic but it really grates with me.

Is this just a bad mannered society we live in now or what?

In a word yes

I don't bother getting annoyed, and the hairy eyeball doesn't work. I usually ask them whether they need a hug, and they move away, every time. Or else I whip my hair in their eye. Also works, without having to bother addressing them.

What *I* don't get is people who gossip and blog about one another, shooting to kill, and act like nobody they know reads it. Don't people know about karma? Sheesh. Crazy bitches.

Know what you mean with the standing in line thing... when somebody is so close I can smell his bad BO, I like to mistakenly swing my bag into them... usually gets the point across... I find the worst of people comes out when they are driving (probably myself included). Amazing what a metal and glass box does to people...

You could always ask "Wollen sie einen Autogramm?"

Bad-mannered society? Yes. Most certainly, but not just in Germany.

Generally Germans do not have as big a need for a personal bubble as some others, but I do have to say for me it very much depends on the other person, i.e. with some I do want my personal bubble (when I do not like a person, or get a weird feeling or when they are just too close), with others I don't care.

The most intriguing fact however is that he seemed to have been American. Maybe he's assimilated too much? Or maybe he was the guy that everyone always hated in the States so he moved to a country where people do not on average want/need as much personal space? Who knows... And I wonder, will we ever know?

Maybe that guy posts on TT, then we might.

Man Schotte, With all those diseases you could have, I can promose that I will give you tons of room if I stood behind you in a queue

I find a good open mouth cough in their general direction usually wins you some personal space! ( you must ignore the look of disgust they give you )

He'll be complaining about people staring at him.

I was at the post office this morning, and there was a guy not standing in line behind me, but he kept standing beside me, I got so annoyed, that when I finally got to the front of the line, I asked him, 'since you are in such a hurry, maybe you would like to go ahead of me?' He just got a shocked looked on his face, and I went first.

If somebody stands too near to you, step in even closer, nose to nose, and growl at them. Like a dog.
Bare your teeth, growl, and look them in the eye and concentrate your thoughts on the idea of ripping their neck open with your teeth and drinking their blood. Visualise tearing their still beating heart from their chest and eating it as they watch with their last dying breath.

They'll think you are utterly insane, and perhaps even rabid. People avoid and get away from nutters very quickly on the whole.

Schotte, you think that's bad..try being a woman in Paris for a week..where men sometimes rub their erections against you in the metro when it's really crowded and you can hardly move.
It's disgusting. Next time I am going to reach back, grab, and squeeze his scrotum until he starts whistling the French National Anthem.

Thats why they introduced Female only carriages in Japan to cut down on all the frotting!

I was waiting for the U-bahn the other day and I am reading "Misbehavior of the Markets" so this 60-70 year old guy he comes up really close to me and sits next to me at the station. What's is annoying is that the rest of the platform is empty. So he starts peeking into my book. I gave him the evil look, so he leaves his grocery bags next to me stands up and stands right before me facing me. He stares, and stares and states and STARES. I look up he is still staring. I am thinking sheeeesh old guy, get a freaking life. So the train comes, I am all happy cause I am leaving the weirdo on the platform. He runs into the train and sits right across me. He stared and peeked into my book for like 45 mins. Talking about weirdos.

If you can feel a frenchmans erection through his trousers, then its probably a carrot that he's chucked down his undies to look all masculine. The french only get real erections when they are on strike about something. All that solidarity crap gets them well frisky. Do a correlation of births, and strikes in France. You'll soon see I am right. Again. As normal.

Understandable in the way they push people into the U-Bahn. Even having read about it I was unprepared for the way I & the diminutive female Japanese colleague (who had been sent to escort me from hotel to company office) got shoved really close together (poor girl; half my height).

Maybe he was Irish? I don't know...I didn't speak to him I just tried to move forward and got off at the next stop.

In that case..I guess he would be whistling "Oh Danny Boy" or something..

The Irish are normally too drunk to maintain an erection, ergo probably wasn't Irish.
Next.

I was frequently on the train in Paris and did not have any men rubbing their erections on me. Which line is that? Is it only the Arabs or all Parisians?
I have to say however, some French guys on the train were hitting on me, they would ask me if I want to drink "coffee" with them.

In this particular incident? Line 1.
The time before? Line 9

Yes..French men love to ask women (especially foreigners) for "coffee". It's their way of saying, "fancy an afternoon fuck with a stranger?" In all seriousness they both looked French and both were older..around 50 I would say. It was also an older man (around 60) who felt me up in the Ikea in Munich once. Old perverts.

Actually a few months ago, I was carrying my cat home from the vet -- he was very ill-- and some weird acne-riddled kid, maybe 18 or so, jumped out of a doorway and asked me in German how I was doing, but in a very weird and overanimated way, if he were hamming it up for a candid camera somewhere. I smiled and kept walking but he wouldn't get off my back-- he was following me down the street, cat in carrier, trying to take the carrier from me or peek in it, just generally being a total nuicance. I was obviously not in the mood, and he was so close that he was touching me the whole time, over my shoulder. I told him to fuck off and he got worse. So I moved to punch him in the nose backhandedly but stopped my fist just a millimeter away, growled at him to FUCK. OFF. And in his shock he finally skulked off, muttering. It was the strangest thing...

Oh okay. Well the ones who asked me were not as hot as the French rugby players so I had to decline.

they never are

Even without knowing you atall, Saint is probably hotter. Case closed. Next.


Drinking coffee? That's no french chat up line. Their normal modus operandi is to drool some tobacco flavoured slobber onto your left shoulder, mutter something about onions into your ear, then fuck off to Calais, block up a few roads with trucks, set fire to some shit, and then try to poke their tongue into your ear, or if they are a bit kinky, their big toe.

You people know nothing of foreign culture.

Don, that's (the coffee offer) the chat up line of French, married men.

edit: actually a single, young, hot Rive Gauche guy asked me for coffee..I took him up on the offer...he was the artistic type though..a film critic with a cat. Totally not my type. And he fit the clichée of stinky, Frenchman perfectly..ugh..that sour "I don't wear anti-perspirant" smell..disgusting.

Okay, you can't argue with that, Saint is a hottie. Additionally, I grew up in mediterrenean countries, and I know how some men from these countries are, and I always make sure I know where I am standing on the bus, on the train and in traffic so I don't have someone pinching my behind or groping my private parts.


So if I don't burn garbage cans I won't have any luck with French men?

Ewww. I know what you mean. So disguisting.

The space issue drives me nuts in Germany, at least when I'm tired or run-down in general. Probably b/c the differences between US and German space rules are subtly different, whereas in France the difference is big enough you know to expect 'otherness.'

I now just ask ppl directly to stand back a bit, say I'm not from here and am not able to adapt to that one bit at that moment. One guy in the grocery looked annoyed, but moved back and asked if it was far enough. Once at the library, a German woman in line behind me was breathing down my neck, and I started talking to the librarian about differences in sense of space from culture to culture ... the librarian got it but the other patron just leaned in closer. Ugh.

The metro was ok - nothing like crowded buses here in D. Once, when I caught a bus in after-work traffic b/c my feet had had it, a woman kept pressing back against me, grinding her butt into my pelvis. I put my work-case in front of me, and she kept ramming her butt against it and gave me a dirty look b/c it was hard. I couldn't think of how to say that if she was looking for a hard-on, I wasn't the right camper. There's no way she confused me with a man, but if I HAD been a man, that action would have made me think she was looking for some quick action. Bus-ticket, all-inclusive.

Lisa, Saint, have you experienced the camcorder or digital camera ?
That one is common on metro and shopping centre escalators in Asia.

I've just come back from the supermarket where the (old) couple behind me in the queue not only stood in front of their trolley breathing down my neck but proceeded to comment on every item I took out of my trolley.

However I've worked out that if I leave my daughter in her car seat on the floor while I load and unload I can leave a suitable space without feeling hassled,

Ha, I've experienced that in Munich. I was standing on an escalator coming up from the S-Bahn at Marienplatz, wearing a knee-length skirt, when I suddenly heard the distinctive loud click of the shutter of a SLR camera (this was in the days before digital), and then felt something brush gently against the back of my thigh, just above the knee. I looked round, and a couple of steps below me on the escalator was a middle-aged guy trying hard to seem to be nonchalantly gazing in no particular direction. Apart from him, the escalator was empty. I was just so surprised at his audacity, that words failed me.

Re people generally getting too close - I once knew a guy who gave seminars on intercultural relations. He said it was fun to watch what happens at an event where you have North Americans and Latinos standing around with their drinks and mingling with each other, because there you have two quite different notions of "personal space". The Latino instinctively edges closer to his conversation partner when he wants to get a point across with emphasis, whereupon the N.American instinctively edges away in order to preserve what he feels is a comfortable distance. So the Latino has to move in a bit closer again, the Ami edges a bit away again, and so it goes on until after a while the centre of the room is empty, and around the sides the N.Americans are up against the walls and edging along it, each one with a Latino in hot pursuit, still trying to get his point across. And the funniest bit is, the behaviour is subconscious, so they are all quite oblivious to how they ended up there. I've had occasion to witness this, and it really does happen like that.