Life Across The Pond

Fair and Equitable Sucks

There's a book out there titled something along the lines of "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." I've never read it but I'm sure it's full of things like "don't hit other kids", "say please and sorry", and "share your crayons". All great ideas.

However, I believe there are other kindergarten lessons which should be forgotten, ignored, or at least outgrown. For example, you shouldn't hold your friends' hands to cross the street. Especially if it's a busy street and your friends and you can't agree whether you can beat the oncoming traffic. Worst case scenario, holding hands will get all of you run over. Best case scenario, you look like a group of grown people holding hands as you cross the street.

As a more practical case, not everything requires lining up. In kindergarten, I can see the benefit. Lines make for easy head counts to make sure all the kids that left for recess come back from recess. It probably also instills some sense of discipline and maybe even purpose to those kids who always rush to be the first in that line. In this case, fine, lines are great. On a BART platform with limited width during rush hour, lines suck. Okay, I see that there is limited seating on the train and that imposing the "line" rule is equitable in much the same way that the line for the playground equipment rewards the kid who has waited the longest with his or her choice of the least battered four square ball. However, the platform is only so wide which means that if you line up perpendicular to the tracks, you've now prevented all cross traffic from freely walking to the stairs without having to say "excuse me" two-dozen times along the way.

That's problem one. Problem two is that you now have one line going into a door that clearly allows two people to pass at the same time. Great! you say. That should settle the problem of people trying to get off the train while other people get on. Well, that would all work in theory if that single file line didn't line up smack in the middle of the door!

And then, perhaps most ridiculous of all is the single file line consisting of people whom, once into the train, like to stand right at the entrance, looking left, looking right, trying to find the open seat that they'd like to sit in. "Hmm....should I sit in that seat to the left? No, that fellow looks a bit dirty. Should I sit in the seat to the right? No, the cloth on that seat is fairly soiled..."

For the love of (insert deity here), Man!! Pick a direction and move! Don't you realize that there's a singly-filed line of people standing behind you, stretching across the platform to the opposite train whose doors are opened and whose own passengers are trying to push around the other singly-filed line queued behind the middle of the its doors, both lines of which are blocking the few passengers who have managed to get off the train from walking through the singly-filed lines of indecisive people waiting for the person who just got on the train to choose which of the dirty BART seats they want to sit on?!?

All I really need to know, I learned in kindergarten. All I later learned I should forget, I discovered by riding BART.

posted by Peter @ 8:29 PM