Postcard from New York: week ending Friday May 26, 2006
I wasn’t in New York much this week, but that made me appreciate our fair city ever more. It was hard to choose from the pics I snapped this week, but I settled on this one, taken at sunrise from gate 96 in Newark Airport. A woman in a tourist jacket, mom-jeans with a camel-toe and a front-butt waddled up to me as I was snapping it, and whinnied, “Excuse me, do you work here?” And I turned around in my rolled up jeans, trench coat and black patent leather mary-janes and asked her right back: “Do I look like I work here?”
I mean, really.
“New Yorkers are so rude!” she whined, and turned to the more jovial, fat hispanic man sitting in the lounge (who was chuckling at our little clash of cultures) and asked him where gate 95 was. “Thank you for not being rude!” she bleated at him as she turned around and gave me a “look.”
“Get over it,” I said (this time being rude, since she was expecting it and I didn’t want to disappoint her), “and learn to count!”
Rude? I don’t think so. If she’d asked a better question, she’d have got a better answer.
May 27th, 2006 at 3:43 am
Hmm…if I’m ever in New York I’d better not ask you for directions! What exactly had this woman done to extract your ire apart from be a bit dopey? From a cartoonist I have expected a funnier retort – or were you just having a bad day?! Nice photo by the way…
May 27th, 2006 at 6:43 am
There was no ire till she got all whiney on me for reacting with incredulousness. There’s a difference between incredulousness and rudeness. I don’t abide by people who think it’s rude not to humor their every lazy whim. If you’re ever in a new york airport and you see a person who manifestly does not work in an airport, and it’s me and it’s 6am, and you ask me if I work there, you will probably get the same incredulous—not rude—response.
When I was in Berlin, once, I was wandering like an idiot in a very bad neighborhood at night, and I asked a German man for directions. He yelled at me and asked me what the hell I was doing wandering around like that, and ordered me to get into the subway immediately.
I understood perfectly and apologized for being an idiot, basically.
Back to Newark. She got upset that I answered her incredulously. Poor thing. There were signs everywhere saying we were in gate 96. She was looking for gate 95. Where did she think gate 95 was? Did it get lost in a Stargate time porthole? Is it possibly miles and miles away next to gate 03? Directions I’m happy to give. But leading a lazy person around by the hand isn’t my thing.
May 27th, 2006 at 6:54 am
And BTW, cartoonists are not known for being very funny outside of their cartoons. We’re actually often very grumpy in real life, with moments of joy and funniness that we save for our friends and cartoons.
Why? Probably because people expect us to be a laugh a minute, and we’ve renounced trying to please everyone and decided to be more selective about who we try to please.