I work with the public and so do some of my friends and we were talking about how crazy many customers are and this is with society basically intact and functional. I think people will lose their minds if times get tougher or if their phones ever stop working. I keep seeing this and I live in a small town with almost no crime. much of it is from tourists. so a snapshot of people from many places. Some still wear masks and are very concerned with crime, because they are used to having these problems at home. I do meet somewhat normal people, whatever normal is nowadays.
@Big Ron your in Canada ?, I see the same folks ,, Masked to the max , They still have not understood
The most dangerous animal is, without a doubt, a panicked human. I'd put them past a pissed off mama grizzly, even! A number of years back, my brother, sister and I decided to spend a vacation together at Disney World, in time to see the Christmas decorations. Brother paid extra for us to stay late, one night, for a special fireworks show. Supposedly only X number of people allowed to buy tickets for it, but it still numbered well over 10,000. Once the show was over, they started herding (yeah, that's right!) the human cattle to the route selected to get us out of the park quickest, and to the trams to the parking lot. I made sure to keep my brother and sister in front of me, while I scanned, scanned, scanned the crowd, for signs of panicked sheeple, ready to grab them and pull them to safety, if necessary. The one thought that kept going thru my mind was, "All it would take, is one wiseass with a string of firecrackers, lighting them off and yelling GUN!!!".....and that crowd would have stampeded, and not cared who got trampled!! Nowadays, after seeing the way people act, I refuse to enter any venue with a large crowd, and limited exits. Call me anxious, if you will.....I call myself SAFE.
Shut off “the internet” and it would be an exciting few months. Once the world got through that and adapted to living pre- say 1995 style the world would settle back down.
More like pre-mid-seventies. I drove trucks for years with a map book and no phone. using landlines and phone booths to call for directions. I tell this to younger folks and they are amazed I could do this. I never had a cell phone until I was in my thirties. I can live without many modern gadgets. I may miss some though. I'm not really that crazy about cell phones, I leave mine at home a lot and find people using theirs at the store or while walking across the street oblivious to the fact they almost got run over, to be annoying.
I did the same thing ,, driving a truck with nothing but a map. The hardest place I ever had to navigate was NYC . Using the old truckers atlas had about 5 pages , just for NYC,,, so when you were leaving 1 Borough , into another,, I had a helluva time keeping my bearings ,, it always seemed the maps were rotated for some reason. I sure don't miss that place .
In 1982, I drove from western NY to San Francisco Bay area (where the Navy was stationing me), with a AAA "trip ticket", individual state maps for each state I was traveling thru, and a AAA book for hotel/motel listings. Each night, I'd plan out the next day's drive, check for cheap motels in that area, then use the phone in my room to make the next night's reservation. Best deal? Reserved a room somewhere in western Wyoming, for $16 (a single). When I got there, the girl was VERY apologetic, and explained they'd mistakenly run out of singles.....would I be okay with a double? How much? $18 a night! Yeah, I think I can splurge on that!!
I was still using a “Gregory’s” Street Directory” till around 2009. I had editions for Sydney from 1988 and 2000. When I was on the bike I would make notes for streets I need to take turns on and slip them in a pocket to grab if needed. I also did much of the east coast and south of the US in 2006 with a map book.
