Walk and chew gum

As the old saying goes, the standard for being uncoordinated used to be people who couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. Nowadays, walking has taken on a much more unsafe role in the world.

I read recently that in the past year, there have been over 1000 emergency room visits by pedestrians who were texting while walking. Several of those had suffered concussions when they walked into telephone poles and traffic signs. Holy shit…I wish I had seen one of those.

A few weeks back, I was heading to my car after work. A young woman was  on the sidewalk coming towards me, head down, busy texting. When she got about 15 feet from me, I stopped just to see what would happen.  She got closer and I was about to stick my arm out to stop her from bumping into me. Fortunately (or maybe unfortunately) she finally looked up, moved to the side and kept on moving. No smile, no “excuse me,” she just kept on doing what it is she was doing. I just chuckled to myself and thought I will have to use this moment some day.

Many people who know me (who have heard my stories or read my facebook posts), know that I like to rant against people driving while using their cell phones; talking, texting, emailing. Some of you might have heard stories of what I have done or said to those people, when given the chance. The really great thing about this new trend in pedestrian texting accidents is that the damage seems to be limited to the offender. I haven’t read or heard any stories about a person inflicting injuries onto another pedestrian because they had their head down and ran into them while they were texting.

I have often wondered if there is some greater powers in the universe? If there is, what kind of sense of humor do they have? So, at this moment, I hope there is a greater power and that they do have a sense of humor. That they will see fit to have some self-absorbed, cell phone texting abuser walk right into a large, hard, inanimate object and break both their thumbs and that I will be there to witness this event. At that point, that won’t be able to text at all and they’d even need some help to walk and chew gum at the same time.