Good job! You tried to be nice and you ended up being an ass.

You want to be the nice guy/girl. You don’t want to be pushy. But there are sometimes when being really nice might not be the best thing to do.

You’re touring in an area with a lot of people, what some people call a city, and you are entering an intersection. In this intersection you will have people coming at you from many directions. Of course, you want to be nice; is this the right thing to do? Let’s see.

The light turns green, signaling that you can cross. You begin to cross someone’s coming toward you from the right. You’re nice, so you stop so that they can continue unheeded. Unfortunately, this messes up the other people who where walking behind you. The guy immediately behind you almost bumps into you because of your kind act and everyone else is having to avoid you. You realize that your kind act, although filled with good intentions, has created it’s own problems.

In a situation like this, the best thing you can do is not be nice this way. It just creates problems when you suddenly change your path. Everyone (pretty much) is basing their path and speed off of everyone else. When you try to be nice in this way, you’re causing many more problems than if you would’ve just continued. In actuality, the person you were being kind to probably was fine without this sudden response by you. It is quite likely that you messed him up as well by doing this.

So you can’t really stop when you’re in a situation like this. It’s just a really bad idea. I know, for some of you, you’ll just want to be nice in this way (I did this a little bit at first), but you shouldn’t. What do you do? Walk; that’s it. If everyone walks where they want to go and only changes direction so that they don’t run into another person then the flow is smooth and there are few problems. It’s something that you have to really try to understand. I never really had to do it in DC, the intersections and train stations aren’t really that crowded (not enough people walk).

Sometimes when you’re doing this, you come within a hairs breath from another person while passing them. When I’m in DC again, I might freak some people out by doing this. I don’t think it’s something they’re really used to, but I am. Unfortunately, it only works when everyone is playing the same game.