This is hardly original but oohh, I'm annoyed... quite unreasonably so, but the point of ranting is surely to have a bit of time to be briefly cross and unreasonable and then go back to being my usual tolerant self...
I was on a bus this morning, sitting minding my own business... when a couple of 14-or-so year old kids got on. They had one of those mobile phones that double as an mp3 player and have a loudspeaker built in... and the kids don't have the consideration to plug a pair of headphones in, everyone travelling on the bus has to listen to their music. And they have it on at such a volume that, if you're listening to music of your own through headphones, their music drowns yours out, so if you don't want to turn yours up, hurting your ears and giving yourself a headache, you have to turn yours off and listen to theirs. Besides the kids' attitude, I deplore the kind of manufacturers who encourage people in antisocial behaviour.
Now, far be it from me to criticise their music. I hated the tracks they were playing, but that's not the point (no, really!). I have yet to hear a mobile phone speaker that can make any music sound tolerable, I should have been just as irritated if they'd been playing music I liked through such a dreadful speaker. These days you can get headphones that do much better justice to the sound.
Seriously, why don't kids today have any consideration for other people? Why aren't they brought up understanding that they're not the only people in the world and they ought to have respect for others? Is it just the ones I come into contact with? Unfortunately though, as I work with the general public and see this all the time, it's not as if the ones I come into contact with are just the idiot few. And I suppose that, having been brought up by two teachers, from a very early age I was used to the idea that there were loads of other people in the world and I had to be a part of the whole. When you grow up around schools, you learn about communities really early and really well.
Why don't kids say please and thankyou any more? To their parents and to everyone else? What's happened to manners? And while I'm on the subject of language, why do so many kids use swearwords in general conversation as if they were just adjectives like any others? Is their collective vocabulary so poor? When the particular kids who sparked this rant wanted one of the bus windows shutting, one didn't say to his friend 'Please would you shut that window, I'm cold?', it was 'Oy, you bleeper, shut that bleeping window, it's bleeping freezing'. And then no thankyou when 'oy you' had shut the window, just another comment about the bleeping winter weather, in a tone that suggested the weather was a personal insult rather than just the sort of weather that happens in Yorkshire in December. What are they teaching in these schools these days? And why aren't the parents, as well as the schools, teaching them the difference between good language and bad, and between appropriate and inappropriate language?
*takes a deep breath* right, now I've finished breathing fire, of course I'm being unreasonable. There are plenty of well-brought up kids out there who would restore my faith in the youth of today, I'm sure. But I really wish they'd come and travel on the same buses as me and give some of their lesser contemporaries a good example. Someone's got to, and some parents and schools seem to be falling far short of the role models they ought to be.