Discussion: People are arseholes

People are arseholes

Agreed

Haha, I usually try not to assume that people are horrible on purpose! But that doesn't stop me from wanting to smack them half the time!

If you want to see people in a public swimming pool with an oversized sense of entitlement and a complete disregard for other users, Kew (the Melbourne one, which serves some fairly posh suburbs) is a good place to find them. I was looking in the AP archives for a big-time spray I gave them sometime around 2007-08 but couldn't find it.

I think some people are just not as aware as they should be, not out and out arseholes. Unfortunately it's always the people who need to be more aware who aren't and vis versa (to some extent)

Haha, you tell 'em Blair. I actually have only asked someone to move out of the fast lane once, and it turned out English wasn't their first language, so they hadn't been able to read the signs (they were walking most of the lane). A lot of pools don't have any guidance for what constitutes "fast", either, so you don't really have a leg to stand on. Plus, I'm not a big fan of confrontation!

I'm not a fan of direct confrontation either - saved it for the (virtual) pages of AP. At the time the local council (responding to local resident lobbying) was fighting legal trench warfare against the Darebin Creek bike path extension - still unfinished a decade later - and I made reference to that breed of south-of-the-river residents who had the view that the only reason people would come there from north of the river would be to "rob their houses or violate their daughters". (These days, we've moved on from scare campaigns about brown people in the northern suburbs to scare campaigns about black people in the western suburbs, which probably isn't progress).

On the other hand, Geneva pools don't have designated fast and slow lanes at all (and because there are only two indoor pools in town with only 2-3 lap lanes at each, they're pretty crowded), which can get messy. The lake's a much better option at the right times of year.

Gees, we're just as backwards as we always were! I never considered that racism would have such a direct impact on bicycle infrastructure.

Oh, that sounds like complete chaos! I would love to swim in open water, but I'm much to much of a wuss to swim outdoors in British winter.

Probably more a class divide than a race divide, although sometimes it's difficult to distinguish the two.