Sunday, February 18, 2007

The most over-rated virtue

It's holding the door open for folks. In winter.

Now generally speaking, it is an act of kindness to open the door for a stranger, perhaps especially kind if the person is elderly or showing signs of moving quickly. But not in winter.

You can take any act of kindness and turn it into an act of thoughtlessness towards everyone else. Holding the door open in winter is thoughtlessness. I've been in too many situations where someone was holding the door open for a friend who was waddling their way over to the door, for a matter of 10 seconds or more, and thereby subjected everyone waiting near the door to drafts of extremely cold air. They couldda waited until the person got to the door.

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