Stability: Or, The Nerd Scooter

I work in a part of town that panders to nerds. It's commonly called "media gulch" in tech circles, and there are times when I'm walking around that I don't know if I am more inspired by the hipsters from the Academy of Art, or mildly repulsed by the nerds who talk about processor speeds and latency with the fervor that most people reserve only for discussing carnal relations.

So it is with this kind of "slightly over all the nerds I encounter every day" mentality that I set out of the office at the end of the day yesterday. I've been in a wee bit of a funk as of late, and therefore I have not been the most empathic person in all of the SOMA district in the past week or two. One thing that I have been consistently rolling my eyes at for the entire duration of my past year's employ at my company has been all the grown men (because, let's be honest, it's always the men) going around on some nerdy "professional" version of a Razor Scooter.

You all remember the Razor scooter, right? They kind of went out when Hansel rode one to the VH1 fashion awards back in 2001 when he upset Derek Zoolander for Best Male Model. You remember them - the scourge of college campuses not because of the sheer number of people riding the, but for the number of people who fell all over the place in an attempt to ride them. Well, thing is, for some tech "professionals" they never went out of style - they just got a little bit bigger, and for some, they got motorized.

Now it's these motorized ones that bother the living hell out of me. They're noisy, the people that "ride" them tend to be asshats, and they leave a nasty trail of exhaust. So despite my funk, I had a little glimmer of sunshine on my walk to the bus yesterday. One of the office buildings I walk past every morning and evening has a long winding walkway (in accordance with the ADA), which I've seen a handful of hotdogs ride their bike up. So as I'm walking towards the bus, awash in the sounds of Explosions in the Sky, I notice a dork with a motorized scooter exiting the building. Rather than being rational, and waiting to crank up the old motorized scooter, he apparently decided that he just needed to risk the hairpin turns of the handicap walkway. So in the blink of an eye he cranks his motor, heads down the ramp, and thwap he goes ass over handlebars, over the railing on the walkway, and into the bushes.

For the little part of me that couldn't help but stifle that "man, I hope he's okay" reaction, there was a huge part of me that smirked and thought "and this could have all been avoided had he simply not been a tool and tried to take his scooter down a wheelchair ramp.

But before you curse me and the fact that I'm a heartless bastard, rest assured - he got up, walked his scooter down the remainder of the walkway (as he should have in the first place) and rode off around the corner.