Quote:
Originally Posted by mlmarr
It's not just the Villages what is wrong with America... people are becoming ruder by the day .. look around the entire country not just the villages .. remember it is winter bird season ..
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Maybe. But even though I'm convinced that these types of behaviors (verbal and physical abuse of caregiver support staff, pilfering fruit, etc.,) are very much the exception here in TV, they DO occur, and probably at rates above that of the population as a whole.
One reason that geezers are more prone to this type of thing is that "as we age, we become more like ourselves". This is not as opaque as it seems: age and declining mental abilities progressively rob us of safeguards we consciously or unconsciously employ to keep our behaviors within acceptable bounds. You see it a lot in nursing homes: encounters among residents turning violent, sexual acting-out on the part of folks who would never dream of doing it (though they conceivably THOUGHT of doing it) when a part of the normal everyday world before age started robbing them of the abilities to keep their more negative impulses under control. Here in TV it may manifest by yelling and cursing at front-desk staff over a scheduling mistake or a prescription not being transmitted, when in years past it may have just been met with a tight smile and a subsequent complaint made to the supervisors of the staff person after we've calmed down.
Second reason (and let's be honest) is that the work ethic here is just not up to the standard that it was where many of us came from. Much of that is due to the pursuit of the almighty dollar: we see it most often when calls to "Customer Service" route to BFE where English-as-a-second language folks handle our complaints with varying degrees of ineptitude, but it manifests here a many times in "techs" doing the jobs that are more appropriately done by licensed caregiver staff, and often with inevitably spotty results, or gatekeepers (AKA the person behind the sliding glass window) who are poorly-paid and even more poorly trained, with consequently more screw-ups.
So--more frustrating incidents happening to folks who are progressively less able to handle frustration, and the results are inevitable.