Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Fox?
Dec. 9th, 2009 08:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
slowfoxSo, towards the end of the walk in this morning, I'm on one side of the road and there's a schoolgirl walking on the other, a little way ahead (say 20 metres or so). She looks over her shoulder, and sees me.
Well, we then both take the next turning, and again this girl looks behind her, and evidently notes that I'm still there, and I can almost see the cogs in her mind concocting nefarious purposes for my presence.
As (bad) luck would have it, our routes continue along the same path for the next few turnings (which is unsurprising - there's a school behind my building), and by now this poor girl is checking her back every few seconds, and looking rather freaked.
I honestly don't know what to do. Stop? Turn back? I figure that any activity other than maintaining my normal route's going to look suspicious, so I'm trying, as far as the physical constraints of street geography allow, to keep as hard to the divergent path of our routes as I can (there's a shortcut I can take through between some buildings off to the right, when I know that she's going to bear off to the left), and making sure that I don't get any closer than that first sighting at about 20 metres.
Of course, now I'm walking on the road rather than the pavement (sidewalk in US parlance), because this particular stretch only has pavement on one side, and although I'd chosen to do this to signal my intention clearly that I'm about to head off to the right, the girl keeps on looking behind her, evidently trying to fathom when, exactly, I'm going to pounce.
Eventually our paths diverge, and hopefully the girl will realise that I'm not actually some evil stalker of d00m, but all the fearful backward glances in my direction, and her obvious discomfort over my (consistently distant) presence does have a cumulative accusatory effect, and I get to my desk feeling somewhat unclean :-(
Depressing start to the day.
Well, we then both take the next turning, and again this girl looks behind her, and evidently notes that I'm still there, and I can almost see the cogs in her mind concocting nefarious purposes for my presence.
As (bad) luck would have it, our routes continue along the same path for the next few turnings (which is unsurprising - there's a school behind my building), and by now this poor girl is checking her back every few seconds, and looking rather freaked.
I honestly don't know what to do. Stop? Turn back? I figure that any activity other than maintaining my normal route's going to look suspicious, so I'm trying, as far as the physical constraints of street geography allow, to keep as hard to the divergent path of our routes as I can (there's a shortcut I can take through between some buildings off to the right, when I know that she's going to bear off to the left), and making sure that I don't get any closer than that first sighting at about 20 metres.
Of course, now I'm walking on the road rather than the pavement (sidewalk in US parlance), because this particular stretch only has pavement on one side, and although I'd chosen to do this to signal my intention clearly that I'm about to head off to the right, the girl keeps on looking behind her, evidently trying to fathom when, exactly, I'm going to pounce.
Eventually our paths diverge, and hopefully the girl will realise that I'm not actually some evil stalker of d00m, but all the fearful backward glances in my direction, and her obvious discomfort over my (consistently distant) presence does have a cumulative accusatory effect, and I get to my desk feeling somewhat unclean :-(
Depressing start to the day.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-09 07:22 pm (UTC)There's not a thing you could have changed. It's one of life's modern inconveniences. The deeper issue here is an urban-ish society where the folks one sees, whether one is a teenage girl or a middle-years man or an elderly alien from Alpha Centauri visiting Hull on a wintry morning this week, are strangers to each other. None of you personally knows the others. If you were acquainted with the girl, or perhaps her parents, then you could holler out, "Oh, hullo Alice! How's your mum? Is her lumbago still troublesome?" and allay any fears. But as a stranger, there's not much one can do to give a passer-by a sense of one's trustworthiness.
It's a shame.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-10 02:22 pm (UTC)'tis a shame, indeed, and obviously, in the whole scheme of 'girl feeling safe' vs 'fox feeling maligned', the balance is a lot healthier if shifted more to the latter. But it still lingers uncomfortably...