The Germans
The other night I was going to Whole Foods to buy dinner. As usual, the parking lot was moving at a crawl (that place is always packed). I was behind a volvo station wagon and this volvo wasn't moving at all. At first I thought it was because the volvo was waiting for a car to unpark, but then it still didn't move.
Seriously annoyed, I pulled around the volvo, and took the space that had opened up right in front of it. As I was parking, I heard honking. When I got out of my car, this middle-aged woman who had just gotten out of the volvo started berating me, loudly, in a German accent. Why had I taken this parking place? Where was my decency? Who did I think I was? All in rapid-fire succession, and with no letup. As I got to the entrance, she grabbed a basket and shouted "You want a basket? Here, take mine! Take it!" So I did. She grabbed a second basket and said "You want another? Take this one too!" I said "No, thanks, one's enough" and went into the store.
Since I'm a wimp, this had sent me into adrenaline overload. I tried to shop but felt jangly, half expecting the woman to show up again, possibly with store management in tow. I rushed through the store, but as I was finishing up at the salad bar, a middle-aged man approached me, and he too began berating me in a German accent. I spent a moment pondering whether it was possible I had made a bad parking decision. Then I asked him: "That was your wife getting out of the car, right? So how could I know you weren't just dropping her off?" He looked at me for a second or so, then walked off indignantly.
This is upper middle-class urban warfare at its worst. Maybe if Whole Foods'd lower the price on their organic tomatoes, or get some tilapia back in stock, we could see peace in our time. Until then, we'd all do well to keep an eye out for acts of terrorism: the bag of overpriced dried figs subtly dropped into our cart, or even the insidious substitution of regular vegetable samosas for wheat-free.