I have a little pet peeve today...and I am gonna go ahead and vent it. Actually, it is from yesterday, but whatevs.
Here is the issue. Yesterday it rained (actually it has been raining off and on for a week or so, neither here nor there). When it rains, obviously, people carry umbrellas to keep them dry. And while umbrellas have some drawbacks...bad vision, decreased maneuverability, carrying water inside, etc...they are generally pretty wonderful things. More to the point, even though an umbrella causes some inconvenience for other people beyond the carrier, no one really begrudges its use.
However...that doesn't mean that it is OK to carry a giant golf umbrella that is roughly six feet in diameter!!! Yes, I am talking to you, Guy Who Was Carrying the Biggest Umbrella I Have Ever Seen yesterday afternoon...
I understand that it provides a huge, dry-area, and I get that it likely kept you dryer than anyone else on the street. But in order to keep your legs just a little bit less wet, you mandated that every person walking in the other direction had to line up and go by you single file because you took up more room than any other three people. And since neither you nor anyone else could pass by the slow-walking woman in front of you, you also managed to stack up traffic behind you as well.
I think that maybe you need to think about why certain things are manufactured in certain ways. The Golf Umbrella is intended to keep not only you, but also an entire bag of golf clubs dry. And it is intended to be used in a place where an average hole is 300 yards long, fifty yards wide and has no more than four people on it at a time. I have been on a few fairways in my life, and never has one been so narrow as to require limits on the personal space of the four people walking down the fairway at the same time.
An average city sidewalk, however, is somewhat more narrow, and quite a bit more crowded than the fourth hole at your local golf course. Maybe, just maybe, the space requirements on an umbrella are just a little bit stricter...
That is all.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Pet peeve
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2 comments:
Love this! Another reason you shouldn't carry it is if the winds are really strong it can actually life you up (or more specifically my 90 lb mother). Her other umbrella broke so she grabbed the golf umbrella to walk to work... the day the weather bomb hit (they said it would have been a hurricane if we lived on the coast)...anyhow the wind + gigantic golf umbrella resulted in my mother being LIFTED up into the air...at which point she dropped the umbrella and it was blown into the river (likely killing numerous ducks in the process). So yes -- golf umbrellas not for walking on sidewalks!
Love your blog - follow religiously!
This made me smile today because it's also a point of contention with me.
Here in LA it's really bad - at the first sign of rain, and by rain I mean what those of us in the Midwest or East would call 'spitting' or a 'light shower' - the umbrella sales begin on the sidewalk.
People will pop up on every corner selling giant golf umbrellas which people buy as if they were going to melt if they get wet.
The streets then begin this mass conglomerate of over-sized umbrellas in the hands of people with no umbrella etiquette.
What is umbrella etiquette? Sometimes you have to lift your umbrella up a little bit to not hit people passing by. When you go into a building you can wildly open and close your umbrella to get the water off without thinking of those around you.
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