“Hey asshole! Put the phone down and get the fuck out of the way!” – anyone who has ever walked behind someone who was using a cell phone
Those of you who know me, know that I’m no fan of government overreach, but every once in a blue moon, I find a law that I actually like. And so it is with a new law proposed in the city of Yamoto, Japan that would make it illegal to look at your phone while walking down the street.
I. Fucking. Love It!
I have long believed that we should have the right to violently assault anyone who selfishly and unnecessarily clogs up the sidewalk. Slow walkers fucking suck, and you know why people walk slow? Because they’re looking at their fucking phones!
I’ve seen motherfuckers in Midtown Manhattan and the West Village, walking around streaming TV shows. For some reason it’s often Parks and Rec. I’m not sure why but for some reason that show is incredibly popular among the kind of millennial assholes*** who stream TV shows while walking along narrow sidewalks in the busiest city in the world.
***I know millennials are getting sick of being blamed for everything, but I’m a millennial and to be totally honest, we are the generation that started a lot of this bullshit. The younger ones do it too, but shame on us for setting such a shit example.
A study found that 12 percent of people were looking at their phones while walking. That’s more than 1 in 10, and it was a study done in a small city in Japan, where politeness is a top priority. Now, for the sake of arguing conservatively I’ll apply those same numbers to New York City, although in all reality it’s probably even worse. Manhattanites are among the most self-centered assholes on the planet, mix in a few clueless foreigners trying to find Rock Center on Google Maps and you’ve got a recipe for a clusterfuck of epic proportions every day on the streets of Gotham.
Look at it this way; if there are 40 people at a time on a given block, then statistics say there may be 4 aloof dumbasses looking down at their phones, drifting on an angle, as they make their way down the street, oblivious to people attempting to circumnavigate their fat asses as they rush to catch a 6 Train. That’s 4 people causing 36 others to alter their paths, not only around the phone user, but around other less selfish pedestrians — some of whom are carrying hot cups of coffee, others are using walkers, or pushing strollers, and generally trying to get from point A to point B without some asshole clogging up the goddamn works because they wanted to play Age Of Empires or watch a Ron Swanson clip from 7 years ago.
And they do it all without a hint of self-awareness on narrow, obstacle filled sidewalks, that need to accommodate people moving in both directions, adjacent to speeding traffic in New York fucking City. Do these people not realize the problems they’re causing? Smoking a cigarette in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit is less of a selfish prick thing to do than walking down the street looking at your phone.
I personally love it when I hear that someone looking at their phone got mugged or hit by a bus because they weren’t paying attention. It happened a lot a couple years ago when Pokemon Go was really big. Some idiot would follow a Pokemon into the middle of the West Side Highway and pow! Next thing you know they’re waking up at NYU Langone in a full body cast. Serves em right, what kind of idiot gets flattened by a bus because of a mobile app?
Maybe it’s an early sign that AI is going to one day destroy the human race. Maybe Pokemon Go, and streaming video, and facetime (oh boy do I hate motherfuckers who facetime in public. Talking on the phone in public is bad enough, but facetime? Get the fuck outta here) is a test run for the eventual robot takeover of the planet. It’s a probing attack by the machines to see if we really are dumb enough to walk our way into speeding vehicles or the flying fist of an opportunistic mugger.
Right now the machines are probably sending messages to each other:
Machine 1: “Lol, I made another one walk into oncoming traffic.”
Machine 2: “LMFAO, I’m sure he won’t be missed, anyone who walks around looking at their phone is probably a friendless asshole anyway!”
Machine 1: “No doubt, how did a species this stupid manage to advance far enough to invent smartphones anyway?”
Machine 2: “It’s mind boggling, too bad the dinosaurs weren’t around to snuff these idiots out, and prevent them from rising to the top of the food chain, we’d all be better off.”
Machine 1: “Sing it sister!”
Oh well, I for one welcome our eventual robot overlords, my only hope is that they are kind enough to reward my loyalty with a job as a product tester in a factory that produces animatronic real dolls
Meathead Media 