Etiquette

I’d like to take two and a half moments, if I may, to talk about door etiquette. I know, I know, everyone’s banging on it about it these days – it’s replaced Bulgarian agricultural policy as the top subject for bar room banter. But I’m going to talk about it anyway, and have already used up some of my two and a half moments staggering apologetically to the point, and for that I apologise.

There a two large, rather cumbersome glass doors at the entrance to my building (the Keith Chegwin Memorial Hospital For The Frequently Bewildered)* leading to a reception area, then a further two doors leading to the courtyard. The heavy nature of these doors amplifies the common, often ridiculous social spastications that make up door etiquette (or DE, or D’). There are 2 primary DE issues, and they are these:

1. You return home from ASDA, laden with plastic bags, brimming over with fragile foodstuffs and bottles of barely legal Polish vodka and, unable to tackle the normal processes of door operation, rely on the person in front of you to continue holding the door open. They don’t, and, as you lie on the floor, covered in broken biscuits and shattered dreams of dinner, bleeding from a door to the face, you ask yourself why, exactly he was holding it open in the first place. Was it malice? Was he the man whose Mondeo you were sick on on the way back from Dave’s party? Is he wreaking some sordid, door based revenge for a crime you remain in ignorant confusion about? Or is he just a stupid sightless wanker? We may never know.
2. You see someone approaching, perhaps an attractive member of the opposite sex with whom you have ambitions of horizontal horseplay. In an overwhelming show of chivalry in the face of heavy doors, fueled by sexual appetite and the desire to make her day just that little bit easier, you swing the door open with the casual ease of a modern day Hercules, resist the urge to salute her beauty, and await her acknowledging smile with heartracing luster . But oh no, alas alack and blow me down sideways: you’ve misjudged the distances, and far from the appreciating grin of a potential nighttime companion, you’ve forced her to run up the steps, breaking her casual stride with the enforced come hither door opening of a potential rapist. Damn your poor spacial awareness, damn your misplaced courtesy and damn your lonely single bed ridden hide.

Was that two and a half moments? Perhaps not, certainly not when you include this little momette that is plonked so subtly at the bottom here. Quite frankly though I shall retain my guilt, as I am new to this world of the blog and am still feeling my way around the nodules and nodes, tabs and tags that adorn this vomit of words like unfathomable baubles. You see, I didn’t want to open with ridiculous mutterings of welcome to readers’ eyes that may not even exist. So I used a crooked metaphor to enter this world of opinion and spleen.

And for that I apologise.

Ta ta

~ by smamms on June 6, 2008.