This year DR and I had promised ourselves we would finished Christmas shopping before November was over. Our final Christmas gift was purchased on November 29th. Mind you we still had some stocking stuffers to get, but we didn’t necessarily need to be in the crazyness of the malls for that purpose.

One week before Christmas on December 18th, I met a very good friend of mine for dinner after work. As it is custom, I meet her at the Bloor subway station and we walk to our favourite restaurant from there. Bloor station is located in a corridor full of shop that goes from The Bay through Holts Renfrew to Manulife Centre, populated by millions of shops in between… oh yeah, it’s a mall.

I arrived a little less than 10 minutes early, she is prompt and usually gets off the subway from work at 5:20pm. It was extremely busy as not only was it time for people to go home but also, one week before Christmas, the shopping was on full blast as well. I found a spot by the wall where no one was standing and where I could keep an eye out for my friend so I darted for it. There I was, standing “out” of the way, left shoulder leaning on the wall, work bag in my right hand, and left foot crossed over my right one. And less than 22 seconds later, Bang! Some lard ass bumped me, looked back, then looked at his bag to make sure they were ok, never said a word of excuses to me, and turned back to continue his race… Of course that pissed me off. But that’s when I totally realized people were in a trance, they were just like extras from Invasion of the Christmas Shopper Snatchers. I decided to conduct a little experiment.

One look at my watch told me it was 17:12. I knew I had approximately 10 minutes to do so. I decided to stay in the exact same position, still where I thought I was out of the main traffic and counted how many people would bump me, 1 point for each of them, and I wouldn’t count the point if people said something “in the direction” of an apology. It didn’t take long at all: Bang = 1, Bang = 2, Touch = 3, Bang = 4, etc. At 17:18 I saw my friend coming out of the subway doors, I stopped the exercise, it had lasted only 6 minutes. In that short period of time, in the centre of Toronto, largest populated city in Canada, I counted 11 ingrates. 11 crass people that think it’s ok to hit someone with their bags, coats, shoulders and not even say anything back. That’s an average of 2 per minute, 1 per 30 seconds. And they were all adults, no children were hurt or involved in this experiment. Counting the man that hit me before starting the experiment, that’s 12 bruisers… He was the only male to hit me.

I took solace in the fact that my shopping experience this year had not been like that at all, we were shopping before the aliens took over the shoppers. My friend arrived, we greeted each other, bitched about the rudeness of Christmas shoppers and commuters, she had had a similar version but inside a subway car. And then it was over, we were on our way to some delicious italian food, we reconnected with our lives and forgot about the discourteous manners of our fellow Torontonians #30.

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