stop making sense

I bought a new phone today. I'm no match for salespeople. In the end, I didn't buy a product; I bought a person. She was enthusiastic and informative (to speak of her positive aspects) and that mattered most.

The business of buying a phone today is hardly desirable. I myself felt like a dismissible product as I glared through the glass counter. People stood around and beside me; they flogged in front of me and asked my sales representative silly questions even as I was clearly in the middle of a business transaction with her. Worse, she even accepted such breaches of social etiquette, casually, without even asking pardon, only to return to me momentarily. At such moments I feel replaceable. I do not feel comfortable in highly crowded, obnoxious environments of this sort.

Speaking of etiquette, I have often noticed these and similar acts of poor social etiquette around me. I enjoy priding myself on a certain level of civil courtesy. It makes me feel good. People say holding the door open for a stranger today is in ways almost always interpreted as a violent act, as if the performance of an old gesture of civil courtesy now suggests its opposite. This may be true. But it isn't always true. All the same, it would be nice if people were generally more courteous. There's a real sense that we've lost something there today. Oft I've seen an interesting person, maybe a dandy on the street, maybe a woman of breathtaking beauty, and wanted to stop and initiate some sort of interaction. One never knows: this person could have been special to you, to me. But in much more than most cases, I'll never know. In this way, the city can be awfully cruel.