Survival of the Fittest

There is a small hallway, in the coffee shop in which I sit. The hallway joins the back two sides of the coffee shop. The following illustration should provide you with a better idea of the layout that I’m talking about:


The red rectangle thing at the bottom is the entrance to the coffee shop. The purple rectangle thing is where I am sitting with friends. The green rectangle thing is the door to a bathroom (the bathroom breaks up the coffee shop and creates a hallway where that red circle is).

While sitting here with friends, we noticed that the bathroom is out of order. An employee kept walking in and out of the bathroom with tools. Many people walked up to the door, noticed the out of order sign, and walked down a back hallway (as shown in the illustration) to the other bathrooms.

This occurred for quite some time until the employee suddenly came out of the bathroom quickly… a puddle of water followed him.

Soon, a bunch of the employees had the hallway blocked off with “Caution: Wet Floor” signs and crates stacked up on each side of the hallway. There was also a mop and bucket leaning against the wall. It looked like a hazardous area.

People walked over crates, wedged themselves between signs, and ducked under the mop handle to get through the hallway. Many of them then looked at the door to read the “Out of Order” sign and then continued through the floor signs, crates, and mop to get to the back hallway bathrooms.

My friends and I watched this idiocy continue for quite some time. After a while we decided to start laughing loudly and making comments under our breaths as moron’s continued to traverse the obstacles instead of walking back around. An employee joined us in the laughing a few times and, after a while, came back with some tape. He put two long pieces of tape across each entrance to the hallway in X shapes. He then put a sign on each X that said “Do NOT Cross.”

We laughed. I joked that someone would get caught in the tape like a fly in a spider web…

A couple moments later, someone pushed the tape aside and ducked under it to get through the hallway…

No offense, but how stupid can you be?

It’s survival of the fittest. We try to protect people by putting up hazard signs and they walk around them…