As Yogi Berra supposedly said: “You can observe a lot just by watching.”
We won’t get into the semantics of the statement, but I did have a chance to do a fair bit of people-watching on Friday evening at Pine Centre.
I was there to set up a radio remote (which had some problems we won’t get into) and finally got things going about 5 p.m. I had to take the remote down again at 7 p.m., so I had a decision to make: Should I go home for a while and then come back, taking my chances on finding a parking spot within three kilometres of the mall, or should I just stay put?
I decided to stay put, as you probably guessed if you read the beginning of my column. I didn’t really stay put though, since I did a fair bit of walking around the mall.
There were a lot of people at the mall on Black Friday, which wasn’t a big surprise, but it was still fairly easy to walk around without running into people or getting boxed in.
I did see one young woman come to a sudden stop when the friends she was walking with did, and the man behind her accidentally stepped on her heel. She immediately turned to him and apologized for the sudden stop, while he was apologizing for running into her.
How perfectly Canadian, I thought. It really was nobody’s fault, but both were apologizing.
There were some other people in the mall who could have learned a lesson from that encounter. There was nothing blatant, but a few things that showed people just weren’t thinking.
Like the group of four people who were walking along, sort of together. I say “sort of” because each of them was a couple of feet away from the next person, meaning they were strung out about 10 feet wide in the mall, taking up a lot of room they shouldn’t have.
Or the people who were looking in one of the store windows, then backed up when they were finishing. Quite frequently, this meant they ran into someone passing by. Take a look, people. It should have been pretty obvious you weren’t the only people in the mall on Black Friday, so show some consideration for others.
There weren’t too many of these incidents in the two hours or so I was people-watching, and most people seemed to be in a good mood.
I may have to start doing more people-watching. It was kind of fun to observe just by watching.