Greedy shoppers and rude laptoppers give me the hump

Why are holiday makers so rude when those who are looking after them are so polite, asks KATE HOLMQUIST

'They're not very big." The tall, wide, blond father from Ohio with his two tall, wide, blond children isn't impressed by the humpback whales. The naturalist on board the Dolphin Fleetscience vessel sailing out of Provincetown keeps his cool.

“They’re 40 tons. About 40 feet long,” the naturalist says.

The tall, wide, blond family stare blankly at the sea, waiting for something more spectacular than the sight of the curved black back rising above the water, the distinctive back fin pointing to the sky, followed by the flip of a four-metre-wide tail, as the whale dives back down for more plankton. Just below the water, the enormous flippers appear sea-green as the whale propels itself into the depths.

“They’re not very big,” the tall, wide, blond father says again.

I want to shout, “This is nature, not a theme park. If you want all-singing all-dancing Moby Dicks, go back to the X-box in your hotel room.” But I don’t shout anything. I’ve heard and seen all this before in the US.

In the south Chatham village shop, where we go to buy our picnic lunches, the owner shares her frustration. She just got a call from somebody ordering a dozen sandwiches, each with individual fillings. There’s a queue of five people waiting to pay at the till (and she works 16 hours a day) so she asks the caller: “I’m really busy right now, can you call back in five minutes?” And the caller says: “If you don’t want my business I’ll buy sandwiches somewhere else.”

This is the last straw. Earlier that day, a man came in at five minutes past her opening time of 7am and wanted to know why USA Todaywasn't in. And why was she out of smoked turkey breast at this hour of the morning? "I don't drive the delivery trucks," she tells me. "I can't tell them the specific time when the turkey and the USA Todayswill be in." This is a small village with a lot of big egos on vacation.

Down at the Box Office Café, where I get wifi so I can check my e-mails and send this column, there’s a similar complaint behind the counter. People come in and use the wifi, cover the tables with laptops and don’t buy a thing, while the people who want to buy breakfast have nowhere to sit.

I always make a point of buying something – a coffee, a muffin, a cute Box Office Café T-shirt even, just to make it worth their while to give me free wifi. I’m in the minority. There are vacationers who have absolutely no difficulty plonking their kids down on the sofa in front of the enormous flat-screen TV showing cartoons at 7am while they check in with the office and pay absolutely nothing.

Then at Marion’s Pie Shop, which sells the best crispy crust pies in the world (seafood pie, blueberry pie, steak pie, cherry pie, clam pie, motto: “well-behaved children welcome, the rest will be turned in to pies”), I am close to turning a lady from Manhattan into a pie. I’ve been queuing patiently for 10 minutes, worth the wait, and when my turn comes, this lady in the queue behind me pipes up with her order. “Sorry, it’s my turn,” I say quietly, gently gathering the attention of the Polish counter-girl. This is by far not the first time an assertively large lady from New York has tried to pip me in a queue. I’m close to buying every pie in the place so that she can’t get any.

Back at the house, my summer neighbours Alex and Diane are chatting in Alex’s yard and I join them. Diane, who’s just back from a run, is complaining about walkers striding four abreast on narrow two-lane Cockle Cove Road and refusing to give way when she runs by, so that her only option is to run in the opposite lane and risk oncoming cars.

“This sense of entitlement drives me crazy,” Diane says. “Each person is at the centre of their own universe, and they want everything now, and everyone is so angry.”

I tell her about the pie-queue and she says, “I have a friend who was a monk. He left the order and lost 150 pounds. He said the hardest part was that with every pound lost he was letting go of the anger. Food and anger go together here.”

I say, “I’m afraid that if I wrote about Americans’ obsession with food, with huge portion sizes, the anger-fuelled gluttony they hold in their bodies because of this sense of entitlement that they have, it wouldn’t be politically correct.”

“So what if it’s politically incorrect?” Diane says. “Write it. It’s prophetic.” I don’t do prophetic, but I share her words, for what they’re worth.

[ kholmquist@irishtimes.com ]