The Sin of Inconvenience

It has occurred to me over the last several years that we have come to measure our social interactions with strangers based on whether and how much they inconvenience us. We have come to think that being inconvenienced by another is among the worst of victimizations. One who inconveniences commits a grievous violation against his fellows. Such a one commits the Sin of Inconvenience.

Look at how we react to the guy who sits through half the duration of a green light because he is giving more attention to the conversation on his cell phone. He only drives after we honk long and vigorously at him.

What about the person in line at the cash register who pulls out a checkbook to pay for his groceries? Worse, he does not even start to fill it out until the total is rung up! A checkbook? Who uses one of those these days? Hey, buddy, haven’t you heard about this new contraption called a debit card?

How about the little old lady who wants to pay in cash and insists on giving exact change, and then rifles endlessly through a bottomless purse in search of those two pennies. Lady, just give them an extra dollar and put the change in that giant purse of yours. At the end of a year, you can empty it all out on the floor and find at least $50 in spare change.

By now, you are probably chuckling and thinking to yourself of any number of other examples. You are chuckling because you have been in that grocery store line and had those same thoughts. It is funny now because, in part, you are laughing at yourself for your own hypersensitivity and lack of patience. Yet, you were not laughing at the time these situations occurred. There was nothing funny about how you felt then.

Quick, which is worse?

• Someone who cuts in line at the movie theatre, or
• Someone who cheats on his sales taxes by not declaring his Internet purchases?

Before you answer this question, answer two more:

• Have you paid all of your owed sales taxes?
• Do you cut in line at the movie theatre?

I’ll bet the answer to both of the second set of questions is NO you didn’t declare your internet purchases and NO you don’t cut in line. Which means that your answer to the first set of questions is that the line jumper is worse than the tax cheat.

In your heart of hearts, I will bet you despise the line cutter with a deeper passion than anything you feel for the sales tax evader. After all, there are many forgivable reasons for not paying the State the tax you owe, right? The state will just waste the money anyway. Moreover, why don’t the rich pay more so you do not have to come up with the difference? Maybe you didn’t even know you were supposed to declare your mail order and Internet purchases. Sure, I might even believe that last one; however, I’m not in the market right now for buying any bridges.

Part of the reason the line jumper bothers us so much is the same reason we are bothered by all the other forms of inconvenience. What makes us angry is the line jumper appears to be thinking only of himself without regard to the inconvenience he is causing to the rest of us. The fellow at the stoplight and the lady looking for the pennies have slowed us down for their own personal and probably selfish reasons. With a little care or forethought, they could avoid taking more time for themselves than is needful and thus not take some of our time in the process.

Another reason we dislike “inconveniencers” is that often they seem to think they are more important or deserving than the rest of us. The line jumper is a particularly odious example. We despise him because the act is so personal. When he cuts in front of us, he is placing himself before us in importance. He is taking something he has not earned. He is taking something that belongs to us. He knows he is doing something wrong. He is being purposely rude, greedy, and self absorbed and does not care. It’s like armed robbery. The thief knows he is doing wrong and causing harm in the process, but does it anyway.

I have always loved irony, and there is irony in spades in this whole inconvenience thing. The very thing that makes us so incensed when others are inconsiderate of us is the same thing that makes us so inconsiderate of others ourselves. I think most of us secretly believe that our time is more important than anyone else’s time. So when we take a few extra moments for ourselves, we are not actually inconveniencing anyone, we are simply exercising out right to spend our time as we think fit.

Let me illustrate.

Want to experience road rage first hand, maybe be shot at? Just pick any major city in the US where many of the people get around by car on the freeways. Los Angeles, Indianapolis, Atlanta, most cities will do. Now, while on the freeway, drive the speed limit in the left lane, not a mile per hour faster or slower. You are guaranteed to make dozens if not hundreds of people thoroughly, and possibly in some cases, murderously angry with you. Go ahead. Do it. I dare you.

But what did you really do? Nothing but slow them down just a little. The difference in going 20 miles at 60 mph compared to going 20 miles at 75 mph is four minutes. Four! Yet, some people are literally willing to shoot you over those four minutes. Many of those same folks, who called you vile names while giving you a single fingered salute as they blew by on the right, will spend four minutes watching commercials in the first 15 minutes of their favorite inane reality TV show later that night.

What justifies it to them is their belief that they have the right to choose how to waste their four minutes today, and their further belief that you do not have the right to choose it for them. If they decide not to waste their four minutes by obeying the law, well, that’s their right. Really, the law can be so inconvenient sometimes.

In today’s rush-rush, time sparse world, we begin to think that these little inconveniences add up to significant chunks of our too short day. We do not like giving our time up to others. We especially do not like the thought that our wait was longer so that someone else’s wait could be shorter, or so they could indulge themselves in activities for which we see no benefit.

A friend of mine sums up the whole idea in an odd and somewhat radical way. He says that every person has so much finite time on this earth. If you die young, you have less time. If you live to be 100, you have more time. In the end, we all have a set amount of time that is just our own. So, says my friend, whenever someone wastes his time, he is being partially murdered. To him, that person on the freeway who wasted four minutes of his finite living time has murdered four minutes of his life.

As he told me this, I laughed. How extreme is that I asked myself.

Yet, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that he had a point. That is exactly how we see it, even if we don’t put it in such stark terms. I do have only so much time to live. Whenever someone else forces me to give up my time to something for which I did not want to give it, well, I have lost that time forever and cannot get it back. I might as well be dead for that amount of time.

Well, maybe not.

Let’s look at this inconvenience thing from another perspective for a moment.

I usually work at home. I generally do not answer the home telephone at all. In fact, in my home office the telephone has the ringer turned off. I only use it for outgoing calls that I make. To me, a ringing telephone is an annoying inconvenience.

Do you think me odd in my aversion to the telephone? Let me go out on a limb here and say that most of us secretly dislike the telephone so much that we consider it a major inconvenience in our lives. This seems a strange statement given our national addiction to cell phones.

Don’t believe me? Then tell me, why is Caller ID so popular? Why did we urge Congress to enact the Telemarketing and Consumer Fraud and Abuse Prevention Act, signed into law in 1994 by President Clinton, which created the National Do Not Call Registry and made it a Federal Crime to telemarket to a phone number on that list? Millions have registered their telephone numbers.

The problem with telemarketers is that once they get you on the phone, you cannot get them off without being rude. I think it is hard for most of us knowingly to be rude. It is easy to be rude when you are not thinking about it, but most of us have to work hard at being rude on purpose. I think the reason we don’t like being telemarketed is that it costs us time and energy to deal with them, by either not being rude, and having to listen to the entire sales pitch, or being rude to cut the call short. We spend more energy than we plan on or want to when they call. Of course, there is also all that time they took from us.

My partially murdered friend might quibble that it is all about time, but I think energy and time amount to the same thing for most of us in the end.

Is that all inconvenience is? Is it just about stealing my time or forcing me to expend my energy without my consent? I’m not so sure I like this concept of my life being bits of time and energy that I control and bits that others take from me. Something is just not right with that model of the world.

Let’s go back to the guy on the cell phone that made us sit through most of a green light. That is bad, talking on your cell when you should be driving, right? Not only is he wasting our time, but also the first priority of any driver is to pay attention to the road. Driver inattention hurts and even kills others quite often, and cell phone use is a major cause of that inattention. Of course, we assume it was something unimportant like calling his girlfriend that he just left 5 minutes ago so he can tell her what a great night he had.

What if the call was to tell him that his mother had just died? Could we forgive him for not paying attention to the green light if that were the case? Is that an acceptable waste of our time?

What about the little old lady looking for the pennies? What if she does not have the extra dollar and really needed to find those two pennies because she does not have any more money for the rest of the month because her social security check will not stretch that far? Is our inconvenience more important that her needs?

We can see there are indeed circumstances when others needs outweigh our inconvenience.

There is a real danger in thinking our time as the only important time, and we should never have to give any of it up without our consent. I believe that sort of thinking ultimately leads to a complete breakdown in society. Life has to be about compromise: I will give a little of my time, if you will give a little of yours.

It also has to be about courtesy, which has to cut both ways. I will be courteous to you by trying not to inconvenience you, and you will be courteous to me by understanding that I am also entitled to my own convenience though it may be at the expense of yours.

Compromise is so hard, especially if I am supposed to trust that whenever you inconvenience me it is for a better reason than my own. People are often so untrustworthy. The guy on the cell phone often is just talking to his girlfriend. The lady looking for pennies often is just indulging her own self-centered oddity of behavior.

In one of his Lazarus Long novels—I forget which one it’s been so many years ago that I read it—Robert Heinlein has one of Lazarus’ daughters show up an hour late for an important family meeting. Lazarus wants to know what her excuse is. She says that she was standing in line at the spaceship station to buy a ticket to catch the flight for the meeting, when a man tried to jump the line. What happened, Lazarus inquired. The crowd seized the man, she says, and a local official immediately ordered a trial and empanelled a jury; she was selected as juror. The trial was held right there in the station, the jury listened to the evidence and, after due deliberation, found the wrong doer guilty. Because of the trial, she was obliged to miss her schedule spaceship and take a later flight. What became of the guilty line jumper, Lazarus asked. She replied that the official immediately executed him by shoving him out an airlock into space (or some such fate, as I recall). Quite rightly, Lazarus agrees, as does the rest of the family.

I cannot think of a single excuse for cutting into a line, and neither could Heinlein. Can you?