Assimilation

Ack! I've been assimilated into the California parking lot zombie society!

I realized as I reached my car this afternoon (in one of this nations never ending series of 'shopping centers' — basically a strip mall on steroids) that I was walking around in a parking lot (not at a heavily trafficked area, but still... there were cars around me) without paying any attention to what was going on. I just don't do that. I had other things on my mind but that's no excuse.

Growing up in New Jersey, I learned early on that cars are big and humans are puny. Any full contact argument between the two would result in a significant damage to the puny human. As a result, I learned to watch where I was going, wait for a reasonable break in traffic and if I was really into testing the limits, run like hell to beat the car. Assuming the car would brake was not rational (the driver could be distracted, drunk, asleep and a host of other mitigating factors). Besides this was New Jersey and you never can tell when the pedestrian hunting season is in full swing; if you're close enough to see the murderous rage in their eyes, you are about to become another bumper decoration.

The result of all this was that as a driver, I sort of expected the same kind of sanity from pedestrians. For the most part you got it (remember, this is the mid seventies, pretty much up and down the east coast).

Fast forward to late 1983 when we moved to California for the first time. My first thought was 'what in the hell are these people doing?' People would look right at you and step off the curb, seemingly daring you to hit them. Are they out of their minds? Umm, no, there is a law that says that drivers are responsible for avoiding pedestrians who wind up in front of them (via any means short of flying I think) as long as they are within a marked crosswalk. Whoa, time to rethink some things. I sort of adapted, we stayed a few months and then fled back to the east coast.

After we moved back out here permanently (more or less, we've been here ever since) in late '87 I noticed this all over again, but it was getting worse. Now it included areas that weren't always specially marked and it began to happen all over... basically any place with a low speed limit.

Eventually, this led to what I call the parking lot zombies.

They wander around in parking lots, completely absorbed in whatever they're thinking about and paying zero (nil, nada and zip) attention to the world around them. It's not uncommon to see a family walking through a parking lot aisle (usually one way in these parts because we typically use diagonal parking), strategically spread across it with a few cars inching along behind them. They'll be chatting, look around behind them, notice some cars behind them and do nothing except to continue strolling along as if this were a situation not to be concerned about. Of more concern is the fast guy (it's not normally a woman) who just emerges from somewhere in a big hurry to get somewhere and looking nowhere.

Of course, this behavior created a paranoia of the pedestrian (or should that be pedestrian paranoia?) where everyone drives along anticipating that someone is going to appear in front of them at any moment. The posted limit in this empty lot is 10? I can go much slower than that! Creeping as an art form has been perfected in this state (we get a lot of practice out on our freeway system too). I think you could post a speed limit of 50 mile per hour and most people would still do about 4 - 5 (some of us lunatics would take you at your word, so I don't recommend this).

Old habits die hard. I still find myself waiting for a break in traffic and at times that makes things worse. I'll find myself waiting to cross as the traffic creeps on by and someone decides that I need to cross now (or that I might accidently lose my patience and run in front of them, I don't know which) but they're going to stop and let me cross in front of them, regardless of the six cars behind them that I was going to let go by. We start waving at one another and I usually have to cross just get them jump started. Of course, I wasn't worried about the side, I was watching the other side where ten cars are now stopped to let me go past.