Patience
Today, while finishing up my holiday shopping I was waiting at a crosswalk. While waiting I witnessed something that struck me as funny. You see, a man approached the crosswalk and after a few seconds of looking around in an obviously perturbed manner he asked me if anyone had pushed the button. I suppose I looked like an expert on the subject, but I politely told him that I didn’t know. He then proceeded to cross the street while the red hand was clearly informing him that it wasn’t safe. He was in such a hurry that he forgot to look for traffic in both directions. Halfway across the intersection this man found himself mere millimeters away from a collision with a fast moving automobile. The funny part of all of this was that I passed him later staring at some useless trinkets in a shop window. He was almost killed (or at least seriously injured) so he could stare mindlessly at a window display of things he probably had no intention of buying. Why do most people have such a hard time waiting for a few seconds? I notice this type of behaviour at almost every stop sign, or stop light or general intersection. People are so put out that they have to stop and wait that they regularly brush aside their own safety and the safety of others all just to get somewhere a few seconds faster and probably do nothing of import.
