The London effect

Working in London I come across a lot of people trying to get money out of me. This ranges from beggars sitting outside shop windows with cardboard box cut out signs displaying ‘homeless, hungry, please help,’ people asking for a quid to get the bus home (you should have thought about the return fare when you went out) to people from a variety of charities asking for a donation to people invasively trying to sell mobile phones, sandwiches, the big issue, stolen season tickets and tattoos (yeah, because I am likely to want to stop and get an impromptu tattoo from some guy on the street).

I have to put up with this crap on a daily basis and have found the best way to deal with this is to totally ignore all these people. No eye contact. No conversation. No acknowledgement that they even exist. Walk straight past. This may sound a little harsh but bear in mind that multiple combinations of these can try to get me from around two to twelve times a day and they rarely take no for an answer and follow you down the street which is pretty rude and so I have managed to justify being rude back. Pre-emptive rudeness if you like.

However, I need to remember that I am not always in London.

This weekend I went shopping at the Oracle Centre in Reading (which for those of you that aren’t up on southern England geography isn’t in London). It was very busy, the ring road was jammed with queuing cars trying to get into car parks. The car parks had queues to find spaces and queues to just get out. I managed to sneak into a less busy car park that my brother showed me a while ago without encountering too much traffic but even so it was a fair hassle.

I found one of the few remaining parking spaces on the top floor of the multi-storey and having parked the car proceeded to get my ‘display in window’ ticket.

At the ticket meter was a young girl. As I went for the ticket machine she asked me ‘please can you spare some change I have come out without any?’ I was in London mode with all the traffic and people and hassle so I totally ignored her. I don’t just mean I looked at her and didn’t respond or said sorry I haven’t got any change (although this would have been a little weak seeing as I had a hand full of change for feeding into the meter). The request for money triggered an instinct reaction to disregard that person entirely. I looked through her and carried on as if she wasn’t even there. Literally, it was as if that what she said failed to register as any kind of input or stimulus. I stuck my change in the meter (although now feeling her eyes on my back) got my ticket and started to walk away.

I walked past the girl. She was standing in exactly the same position she was in when I had walked ‘through’ her. Two other people had started to queue at the ticket machine whilst I was getting mine but she wasn’t accosting them for change. She was stony quiet and rigid in the same position I had more than ignored her in, staring at me and looking more than a little jilted.

Of course it took my brain a few more steps to put all this together and by then I had walked past the girl. She was genuinely short of change, she had, like me, fought past the ring road, found a parking space, gone to the meter to pay for her ticket and realised she had no change. Rather than go through the busy ring road and parking ticket hassle she had tried to fall upon a stranger for some gentle assistance…. me. And I acted like she didn’t exist. It wasn’t so much as I was just rude, that would imply that I acknowledged she was there at all. I disregarded her entirely. And from the expression on her face as I left the ticket machine I think really messed with her day.

I know I can be abrupt at many times but having to battle past people trying to force money out of me on a near daily basis has clearly added an extra layer of generic cynicism. Three months ago I may well have said no to this girl’s request for money but I probably would have tempered that with a bit of sympathy and common courtesy.

So, sorry to girl at ticket machine near the Oracle Centre, Reading at circa 2pm on Saturday, I thought I was in London and I do feel pretty awful about it.