EPTWhat does this have to do with reading instructions? In my case, nothing. I've done well today and have made the right train and am actually getting into London earlier than I thought I was. But what has struck me this morning is the inability, seemingly, of people to read basic information and process it in a meaningful way. When I first got on the train I showed my ticket as requested, and sat down. Being the modern geek that I am (I claim to have been a geek before it was cool to be one....geek hipster?) got out my laptop and phone for the tethered internet.
So I was in a perfect place to hear a discussion between the ticket inspector and a guy who apparently had trouble reading a departures board, as he apparently had mistaken the train I was on for one that left approximately 10 minutes later. Somehow, in spite of the fact that the train wasn't due to leave for another ten minutes, and his train wasn't on the board, and the fact that the destination was clearly labelled on the display on the side of the train...
The guy had gotten on the wrong train.
And this only came to light because, as far as I could tell, he had a seat booked and therefore was conflicting with one of the few other passengers on the train about whose seat it was. He was informed of his mistake and attempted to leave the train. I don't know if he made it, as the train departed approximately thirty seconds after he headed out. I hope he got onto his train...
Then, about 12 minutes after we departed Sheffield, we arrived at Chesterfield, and a man who I swear sounded like he'd just arrived from the set of the Sopranos, got on and made himself comfortable. This guy, it turns out, was also on the wrong train. He'd apparently somehow been misinformed or misread the instructions and was on a train that went to the same destination, but left 10 minutes earlier, and arrived very much earlier. The big deal about this is that trains are priced according to things like how long the journey is, so he'd jumped onto a train that would have cost him significantly more than he'd have paid for his original ticket.
The ticket inspector was magnanimous (all hail the mighty ticket inspector) and allowed him to stay on the train. This was quite a thing, as buying replacement tickets would have cost approximately £200.
And I sat there, and I marvelled at how dumb some people can be. How simple is it, I chortled to myself, to read a set of simple information and do a simple thing based on that information. And to think it had happened on the same train twice in the space of fifteen minutes. And I'm tired, rushed and I still made it to the right place.
At this point, I signed into Team Liquid and went onto the SC2 forum, and had a moment of reflection. I was playing Starcraft the other day and played a TvZ against a random person on the ladder. All very normal. I got basically overrun by a large force of ling/bling/muta, and just didn't have the forces to stop them. I could have done. I had the resources and I made a shed load of marines. And a few medivacs...and that's it. My composition was bad and died horribly to either banelings if I clustered up or lings/mutas if I didn't. I told myself to make mines, but somehow I completely forgot in the heat of the moment. I thin I made a single Thor... just in time for cracklings to swarm over my supply depots and kill it.
I had meant to make widow mines, but I didn’t. A simple mistake and an obvious thing to do. I even had the factory hotkeyed and had researched Drilling Claws. All I had to do was press 7 and D a few more times than I did, but did I? Apparently not. Also, I can now add that game to the increasing list ofgames that I may have lost because I forgot to close my wall. Again, a simple thing that not only have I done, but keep doing.
Granted the situations weren’t exactly the same, but the parallel seemed basic enough. It may have been a simple mistake, and I shouldn’t have made it, but in the moment, I had. Perhaps the same had been true of the two people I saw on the train and that they had, in a moment of panic or stress, missed something and made a mistake which, in the case of the second guy could have cost him a lot more than a lost game of Starcraft...
It’s something we forget when looking at people within a specific context such as Starcraft or League of Legends or Counter Strike. It’s easy to forget that these people didn’t just come into existence at their keyboards. Granted we can’t see what the people on the other end look like or how they’re feeling. But it’s too easy to call them bad and noobs and basically bm them for what might well have been a terrible day or a simple lapse. I suppose that’s why I’ll always try to say gg back to people when I beat them. At least give them some good manners and try to improve their day, even if they think they played the worst game of all time.
Unless it’s friends or clanmates. But that what friends are for...
*This post was brought to you by the letters tired and aching and the number of hours of sleep of ...5, maybe?
