Open Letter

To the gobby Australian at the Tracy Chapman concert on Monday night:

Look, in all honesty I just don’t care about how you feel so hard done by for having to work a late shift on your birthday, and an early the morning after. I particularly don’t care upon your fourth repetition of the same information. Equally, I don’t give a damn about whether you think that an accountant would be someone good to marry, “because they’ve got a boring job”. (Note, I don’t understand the logic of it either, but I’m working on not thinking about the idiot antipodean bint’s inanity)

As for your abysmal punctuation skills, I’m hard pressed as to be more gobsmacked at the fact you were quite happy for the entire back row of the Hammersmith Apollo to know you were that easy, or the fact that you can’t spell/punctuate, and thus don’t know whether you’ve upset your one-night paramour. The fact that he “thanked you for last night” by text message, along with a desire for a re-match post-Festering-Season was enough for me, regardless of your response of “No thank you”, when you meant “No, thank you!”. No-one cared that you were a) an idiot, and b) a slapper, but you still felt the need to broadcast both pieces of information at great volume.

We all noticed how hard-done by you are to not be able to return to Australia four times a year, the way your (obviously much more highly-paid) sister can, and yet not one person managed to summon up any sympathy. Hell, even the friends you were shouting at talking to didn’t care enough to do anything except let you carry on making yourself look like a shallow twat.

However, I suspect that I wasn’t the only one who found the irony amusing of your tale of your neighbour having been taken ill and the ward nurse telling you she couldn’t give information about a patient’s medical status as you a) weren’t family and b) it was unethical to divulge medical details – only to then tell everyone in earshot about how he’d had some kind of liver failure, and was on 15-minute observations, along with a large amount more information I can’t be arsed to recall right now. I assume you got the information through your work as a nurse – I think it was at Barts, but you mentioned so many hospitals where friends worked, I lost the ability to care or recall which was which – but to then be busy broadcasting it again in a public venue, well, it almost made me wish your supervisors were there too.

As it happened, some people were trying to hear the support act – not your Australian foghorn. No-one else cared about your life – much as you didn’t appear to care about anything resembling privacy, consideration, or any concept of “unsuitable conversations for a public space”.

In short, shut up and fuck off. No-one cares.


3 Comments on “Open Letter”

  1. Blue Witch says:

    Am I the only one who actually tells people in such situations to shut up? (more politely than that the first time, but less politely if it continues after that)

  2. Lyle says:

    No – if she’d carried on during the main act she’d have definitely been told to shut up and fuck off.

    As it was, well, the support act wasn’t very good. But all the same.

  3. Gert says:

    You me and BW and countless others have all had too many experiences of this sort of behaviour. And always, it’s just one or two people, in a hall of otherwise well-behaved people. What kind of existence do people lead if they

    a) can’t notice they are behaving very differently from others;

    b) do notice but decide that in their bid to be different (which in some contexts is okay or right) means they don’t have to abide by common courtesies and social norms; or

    c) have never been on the receiving end of inappropriate anti-social behaviour so have no insight how annoying it is.

    Occasionally, I gently rebuke teenagers for dropping litter or messing around and they look sheepish and I know that, really, they know better, because they have been brought up to know better. I am confident that they get past the awkward teenage years and remember again how to behave (especially when I acknowledge their apology or thank them for their remedial action with good grace). But to get beyond that and have no sense of how to behave in public really does point to an upbringing which hasn’t distinguished between right and wrong. Chances are they’ll breed and make the same mistakes. And I’m not discussing the stereotypical feral underclass type person, but people who ostensibly come from a ‘good’ home.
    /rant


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *