Ask Moylen Green, your agony Ent, for the latest hints and tips on ANYTHING YOU CAN THINK OF.

Andrew B, Sometimes Guitarist and always Faith No More Fanboi, asks me the following:

“People who inevitably stop in the thinnest section of a path blocking others from getting through. Should they be forced into “how to walk” classes for eternity?”

Well Andrew, the question answers itself – it’s an irrelevant question. These people know HOW to walk, they have just chosen to no longer do so. Perhaps they are old, or  feeling poorly. Did you consider it might be a day of an Asthma Storm and they didn’t have their Ventolin on them? You should be a little more considerate before jumping in to judge the ability of walkers.

Stopping is an important part of starting.  So they do not need to go to How to Walk classes as they clearly understand How to Walk as well as How to Stop.

However…

Breaking the Rules

I would agree these people have broken the following unwritten social norms and they should be punished in some manner. Points to note:

1. They have stopped on a thin bit. You can only legally and morally stop on a thick bit – unless there is a valid and justified reason to stop. Valid reasons could include some of the followingn: a snake on the path ahead, death, shortness of breath, a facebook message notification they have to stop and look at, they have seen an ex partner and wish to avoid them.
2. They are blocking a path and that we know based on the Romans and their need for speed by making roads 2.37m wide. If a Roman decade came through in anger and that person was blocking the road, they would be run down.
3. Your journey is more important than their ‘it’s about the destination not the journey’ stoppage
4. Perhaps they had reached their destination, perhaps the thin bit of the path is on their bucket list.

The punishment

A suitable punishment may indeed be some form of eternity, possibly even a worse eternity than the knowledge they have to wake up every day and look in the mirror and realise what a path-stopper they truly are.

Perhaps a suitable punishment could be that they are forced to take that subject I had to in 2001 in my Grad Cert in Computing Postgraduate Certificiate: “An introduction to programming, C++”.

They are forced to never get to the bit that makes you understand what an object is, although it is constantly referred to and hinted at for all the functions, variables, and arguments in the earlier bit of the course. I mean, I did that class, and I didn’t learn what an object was, it was only when someone learning Ruby told me a bit in a way that finally made sense to me, that I understood it at all. It was a terrible class. The person running it wore knitted dad-jumpers and the tutorials were farcical. I think an eternity in that class would be adequate punishment for any crime.

I hope this answers the question adequately.