{"id":636,"date":"2008-05-01T11:50:10","date_gmt":"2008-05-01T11:50:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scientopia.org\/blogs\/goodmath\/2008\/05\/01\/suited-assholes-on-the-subway\/"},"modified":"2008-05-01T11:50:10","modified_gmt":"2008-05-01T11:50:10","slug":"suited-assholes-on-the-subway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/2008\/05\/01\/suited-assholes-on-the-subway\/","title":{"rendered":"Suited Assholes on the Subway"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> Pardon me, while I go off on a rant.<\/p>\n<p> Since I came to work for Google, I have a pretty long commute. Most of the time, I don&#8217;t really mind it. It&#8217;s all by train &#8211; first commuter rail from home into the city, and then subway from the terminal to my office. Commuting by train is not bad at all &#8211; you get some quiet time before and after work, to sit and read, or just relax.<\/p>\n<p> But in a year of doing this, I&#8217;ve learned a couple of things. And today&#8217;s commute gave me a perfect example of one of them. People who wear suits to work in Manhattan are the biggest god-damned dicks you&#8217;ll find anywhere.<\/p>\n<p> I see just about every kind of people you can imagine on the subway on my commute: black, white, and every shade of brown that there is. I hear<br \/>\njust about every language you can think of: today, I&#8217;m sure that I heard<br \/>\nenglish, spanish, hindi, cantonese, and japanese being spoken by different people. But the <em>only<\/em> group of people that I&#8217;ve had any unpleasant experiences with are white guys in suits.<\/p>\n<p> I cringe when one gets onto the train behind me. Because they&#8217;re invariably the people who feel like they&#8217;ve got a <em>right<\/em> to more personal space than anyone else, and will freely use their elbows to enforce that. They&#8217;re the people who&#8217;ll park their ass right in front of the subway door, and refuse to step aside to let people off of the train. They&#8217;re the rudest, most obnoxious, entitled, shits you&#8217;ll ever have the misfortune to meet.<\/p>\n<p> And they&#8217;re also the ones who complain more bitterly about everyone else on the train. The asshole who won&#8217;t get out of the doorway of the train<br \/>\nis always the guy who opens up about how rude black men are after one of then pushes his way through to get off the train at his stop. They&#8217;re the ones who, after elbowing other people aside, bitch about the dominican guy who they had to shove. They&#8217;re the ones who can&#8217;t talk to each other without shouting &#8211; and then shout about how annoying it is to them to have to listen to people on the train speaking spanish.<\/p>\n<p> The stereotypes of New York City invariably portray New Yorkers as rude, obnoxious people. But usually, the ones that they&#8217;re portraying as rude aren&#8217;t the guys in suits; it&#8217;s always the minorities or the working class. But in a year of this commute, I&#8217;ve never seen one of those stereotypical New Yorkers being the least bit rude. In fact, in general, I think New Yorkers are some of the nicest people you&#8217;ll ever meet. (The best description I&#8217;ve ever heard of New Yorkers was &#8220;If you&#8217;re walking out of the subway with a stack of papers, and drop them, New Yorkers are the people who&#8217;ll help you catch all of your papers, and then tell you what an idiot you are for dropping them.&#8221; That&#8217;s NY; we&#8217;re very direct, but for the most part, we&#8217;re good people.)<\/p>\n<p> The assholes are always the rich guys in suits on their way to work, who feel like they&#8217;re entitled to more than anyone else.<\/p>\n<p> What brought this little rant on is that I got stuck on the subway this morning. Four guys in pinstripe suits got on behind me; spend the ride sneering like a bunch of overprivileged frat-boys about every non-white person on the train, and then as a group, blocked the doors at my stop, so that no one could get off. They weren&#8217;t <em>trying<\/em> to block the doors; they just happened to be standing there, and the idea of taking a step to one side to let anyone off the train &#8211; well, they weren&#8217;t <em>about<\/em> to move for<br \/>\na bunch of lower-class slime. It wasn&#8217;t <em>their<\/em> stop. Of course, if anyone got in <em>their<\/em> way when they wanted to get off, they would have gone off into a giant flaming rant about how awful it was that the <em>Insert Ethnic Group of Perpetrator<\/em> got in their way, and weren&#8217;t all <em>Members Of Said Ethnic Group<\/em> a bunch of jerks.<\/p>\n<p> It&#8217;s pretty much exactly the Bill O&#8217;Reilly syndrome. I&#8217;m sure everyone<br \/>\nremembers how he was shocked that at a black restaurant in Harlem, no one was<br \/>\nshouting out &#8220;Hey motherfucker, more ice tea over here&#8221; &#8211; because he really<br \/>\ndeep down believes that minorities are a bunch of crude, stupid, obnoxious<br \/>\nassholes. But his regular daily behavior is even worse than his stereotypes<br \/>\nof his hated minorities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Pardon me, while I go off on a rant. Since I came to work for Google, I have a pretty long commute. Most of the time, I don&#8217;t really mind it. It&#8217;s all by train &#8211; first commuter rail from home into the city, and then subway from the terminal to my office. Commuting by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chatter"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-ag","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}