Sorta-kinda Non-whinge 1

From my experience in working in the city I have learned that making eye contact with the various charity cases and workers around Central Station is asking to be sucked in. The one time, and the last time, I did this, I was sucked in good-and-proper – this woman at Wynyard smiled and mouthed / said “Hello” like she’d known me for ages, and at the time my memory for faces was such that it could well have been someone I knew / should have known. But then she launched into a sales pitch which pissed me right off, so now I don’t even acknowledge their presence. 

OK it sounds uncaring but that’s what this city has created. Even to the point of a guy coming up to me when the railway ticket machine was paying out, and asking me for change. I flatly refused. And the other guy who asked me for money when I’d been at the ATM – when I gave him my pocketful of change he looked at it and then asked for notes.

So this kid yesterday at Westpoint launches himself at me from the Vodafone office on the ground floor. Here’s me with my family, and he asks me something that I (for wont of trying) could not hear. Then he stated the bleeding obvious – I have cancer. “So do I”, I responded. “Oh, sorry”, he said, and I thought that would be that, but no – he launched into his spiel: he has cancer, he can’t perspire (a self-declared birth defect), and he needs to raise $20 (probably to recharge his phone).

It’s not often that I play the card, but that one was more “yeh, so do I, and I have a family to support, so bugger off”, but he persisted. Then, after I gave him the $2.20 I had in loose change, he just looked at it, and left. Bastard ingrate. He was deaf as well (hence his inability to make himself heard – maybe I should have played that card as well …)

OK so our society, and especially around that area, has created people who can’t look after themselves for various reasons, and to an extent I make my contributions to them indirectly. But if I gave to every charity that presented itself during the day, I wouldn’t be able to provide for my family in the limited extent to which I do so. And if I have headphones on, it means that I can’t hear you, and won’t remove them to do so.