Goddamn people give me the shits.
Well, drivers in particular. I've whinged about this before as I recall, but it's about time to revisit the topic.
Shopping centre car parks are a seething violent cesspool of anger and malevolence. It's not so bad in the city, because generally people are in there for a longer haul – dinner, or a movie, etc. So you can drive around in a somewhat leisurely fashion, and your chances of getting a park don't particularly increase whether or not you behave like a marauding hun.
Shopping centres on the other hand seem to work differently. I don't mind the idea of driving around and letting the law of averages provide, however other peoples' mentality changes when they rationalise to themselves that they've only got to be there for a short time. You know, the whole “Well I'm only ducking in to get a paper, so I can park in this loading zone for 5 minutes”.
This is where the trouble starts, because then a truck turns up with some unloading to do, and they can't get into the loading zone. They can't just wait in the middle of the road for the other person to move though, so they'll pull in to the car park designated for people using tha ATM. Of course, someone will want to use the ATM, and they'll get a little narky because there's a bloody great truck there unloading (and conspicuously NOT using the ATM), and in the meantime, the next person into the carpark can see there's a blockage, so they'll go against the arrows to come around the other way… then a guy starts backing out, the guy waiting for the ATM goes to pull in there, but the guy who's gone the wrong way was indicating about 2 seconds beforehand, so there's a standoff and meanwhile the guy backing out can't get out. And so on and so forth.
Mind you, the carpark at Mitcham shops was designed by a blind 8 year old on acid, so that's a factor too.
Yesterday my 30th anniversary release of Dark Side of the Moon turned up, so that's pretty cool…
It's in SACD format, which means you can play it on a normal CD player, but to get the 5.1 mix you need a special one, and the ones I've seen are reasonably expensive… Plus from what I've seen, there's not that many SACD titles around that I'd buy. Or at least, none that I'd want to actually sit down and listen to in the way that I would with Dark Side. Maybe I should pop over Goodwood Road to the spanky stereo place and “try out one of their systems” ??