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 11:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-09 01:01 pm (UTC)Roll on a perfect world!
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Date: 2009-12-09 01:18 pm (UTC)I was clomping along the main road and there was a young teenage girl a hundred yards in front of me. She turned down my side road so obviously I followed. Then as it was cold I started to walk a bit faster, and noticed strangely that she did too. Then she turned down another street, still on my route, so I followed. At this point I realised I was going to miss the start of my TV program, unless I really hurried, so I broke into a jog. The poor teenager must have expected an immediate attack but she gave a startled cry and sprinted into the distance!
So you are not alone ;-)
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Date: 2009-12-09 01:57 pm (UTC)It's nothing to do with you personally - you're not scary and you don't look scary. It's more a sign of the times and stranger-danger awareness that's drummed into (particularly) girls from a very young age onwards. About the only thing you *could* have done was to find the need to stop and re-tie a shoelace or something in order to increase the distance between you and her.
*more hugs*
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Date: 2009-12-09 05:26 pm (UTC)...it was just a sad situation, because I couldn't really think of any sort of action that I could have taken which wouldn't have looked suspicious in some manner or other.
At least if I continued on my commute as usual, I at least had a rational justification for where I was and what I was doing.
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Date: 2009-12-09 05:28 pm (UTC)Yes, but what happens if the girl was sufficiently spooked to report my 'actions' to someone on arriving at school, and then they track me down and ask questions about what I was doing? At least if I stay on track, I can legitimately argue that I was simply taking the most direct route to work. If I start to deviate from that, because I thought the girl was unsettled by my presence, that opens the floodgates to a whole torrent of slightly sinister possibilities.
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Date: 2009-12-09 05:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-09 05:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-09 05:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-09 05:31 pm (UTC)But even then it might look like I was taking the opportunity to scope the surroundings etc... (not that I can think the worst in every situation, but I do give it my best shot)...
It's just a shame that the girl was spooked, and I maintain that there really wasn't much I could do except proceed as normal... anything else could've been interpreted in many ways, not all of them positive.
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Date: 2009-12-09 05:32 pm (UTC)Ah well.
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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.
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Date: 2009-12-10 02:14 pm (UTC)I'm sorry this made you feel uneasy but I think you did the best possible thing for you and the girl by not deviating from your normal pattern until the shortcut. I'm convinced that she wasn't afraid of you in particular but troubled by the fact that a stranger seemed to follow her.
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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...
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Date: 2009-12-10 02:25 pm (UTC)Yep, I'm sure that's the case... it's just unfortunate, really. But I also think that had I done anything but follow my normal route, then there would've been scope for negative interpretation somehow (and given the girl's unsettled demeanour at the time, I'm sure she'd have come up with just such to unsettle herself further).
no subject
Date: 2009-12-14 06:52 pm (UTC)