Bullying (from wikipedia):

Bullying is a form of aggressive behavior manifested by the use of force or coercion to affect others, particularly when the behavior is habitual and involves an imbalance of power … Bullying consists of three basic types of abuse – emotional, verbal, and physical. It typically involves subtle methods of coercion such as intimidation.

Sunday. May 13. Mother’s Day.

I’m working on my laptop at a cafe in San Francisco.

A large man and his wife come in and sit down at the table next to me in the corner and set up their laptops. Shortly after, I think the man’s phone rings — but no, it’s his SMS notification set to a loud ringtone instead of a “blip” or a “ding” or anything less obtrusive than a ringtone.

Thus begins an hour long session in which the man continuously receives text messages at an average of about one message every two minutes or so — sometimes more, sometimes less. And each time he receives a text message, his phone blasts out his ringtone…

About 10 minutes after they arrive, I notice the man puts his headphones on. I’m thinking this will mark the end of his texting — but he keeps his phone notification on — and at high volume so he can hear it over the music in his ears (which he “explains” to me later).

By this time, however, I’ve already put my headphones on in an attempt to drown out the sound of his phone with music — it’s not very effective, but I keep thinking that there has to be an end to these notifications — this is just a minor inconvenience, I can wait it out.

But an hour goes by and his phone hasn’t stopped ringing. And it appears the couple probably isn’t leaving soon either. Most people who have sat in our immediate vicinity have come in, had lunch, and left — probably not enjoying the ringing, but not having to live with it for an extended period of time either.

So after the next ring, I get the man’s attention and ask if he can please put his phone on vibrate. While I wasn’t particularly “happy” sounding, I wasn’t rude. It seemed like a reasonable request (to me) — I expected he’d say sure, no problem — and I felt silly for having waited so long to ask.

But he said no — and stated that he was in a public place and there was no reason why he should have to do that.

I was surprised — and I wasn’t sure how to respond other than to be honest and say that I thought it was rude — not only to me, who had to sit next to him, but to anyone nearby trying to enjoy their meals in relative peace while having to listen to his phone ring every 2 minutes.

And this is when he started mocking me.

My usual response to confrontation with strangers is to just “be the bigger person” and back down — let it go and forget about it. I knew I could simply avoid further communication and just move to another part of the cafe and hope to find an available power outlet — but I was now a tad irked at his offensive attitude. And he was being a bully.

So rather than shut up, I continued making my case — completely calm, as if we were just talking and having no issue at all.

So he continued mocking me, increasing in volume as the minutes passed, and then he finally lost it. He stood up and over me saying, “Let’s go!” — He wanted to fight.

It was so surreal, so out of place. It was hard for me to believe that this man in his late 30′s or early 40′s was taunting me to physically battle it out in a cafe.

I simply remained calm and didn’t react — hoping that the adrenalin making my legs twitchy wasn’t noticeable.

Without anything to immediately react to, he stood there awkwardly for a moment and then sat back down, swearing, and then called me a couple choice names (you know, derogatory terms you call someone when they back down from a fight) — and “less than a man”.

I looked at him for a moment — processing what had just happened — and then very calmly said that I thought he was being a jackass and that he had some serious anger management issues.

He didn’t like that very much.

He stood up again, arms out, towering over me in a menacing fashion and shouted, “Are you calling me a jackass!?“

“Yes“, I replied, “You’re a jackass.”

He reached forward, but rather than grab me, he grabbed the wireless mouse off my table and threw it across the cafe nearly hitting a guy.

Well, I certainly couldn’t have guessed that this was going to happen today.

I felt like my body was vibrating — in full-on “fight or flight” mode — but still, I didn’t react.

And because I didn’t react to my mouse going flying, the man grabbed my phone and chucked that, too.

While I don’t believe in violence, I have to admit that at this point I took a moment to imagine what might happen if I simply knocked this guy out — you know, like they do in the movies. They make it look so easy. But it was just a passing fantasy and I thought better of it and did nothing.

And so he reaches forward and slams my laptop shut — WHAM!

One of the reasons I simply hadn’t gone back to working on my laptop was because it was in the middle of the automated process of stitching a photo panorama together — and actively reading/writing to the drive. A process that usually maxed out my memory and processor power — and it’s not really a good time to forcefully slam a laptop shut.

I wasn’t really thinking about that though, I just knew that my laptop was going to go into hibernation mode and that I was almost certainly going to lose what I was working on.

I look down and see the remaining item on my desk that he hasn’t thrown or attacked — it’s a portable hard drive full of photos. I grab the drive and put it in my laptop bag. And then, without looking at the man standing there, I got up slowly and walked to the front of the cafe and found the manager.

The manager was talking to one of the staff who was in the process of alerting him to the “situation” taking place. He recognized I was one of the people they were talking about and I joined the conversation to explain what happened. I told the story and admitted my part in calling the guy a jackass — the whole time trying not to let the adrenaline in my system alter my voice and betray my sense of calm.

The manager listened to what I had to say trying to process how he was going to respond to it. After I finished my story, he said he’d be over shortly to talk to the man. I wasn’t sure if I was going to get into trouble or not…

I took this opportunity to fetch my mouse and phone from across the cafe — now noticing the spectators. ”Man, that guy is an @#$@!”, one said. Then I walked back to my table and started putting my things in my laptop bag to move.

Seeing me pack my stuff, the man considered it a victory — started calling me more names and continued mocking me.

“You pussy! What a fucking coward!”

With everything finally in my bag, I stepped over to the man and very calmly said, “You know, you really are a jackass.” — except I added an effing to it this time. :) (I know, I know — not what you do when you are de-escalating a situation!)

Well — he was just looking for an excuse to get up. He burst out of his seat and came at me with all the force he could muster — just as the manager came around the corner — and he pushed/punched me with the palms of his hands in my chest. I’m deceptively heavy for my size, so this knocked me back a few steps — and it stung — but I stayed on my feet. I was later told that if I hadn’t caught myself so quickly, he would’ve pushed me into another customer.

While he and the manager “talked”, I relocated to another part of the cafe — around a corner and out of site. Shortly after that he got kicked out. Management came and found me, asked if I was ok and if I wanted them to call the police. I said no, I just wanted to get some work done. At the time, I had no idea that he’d damaged my laptop’s hard drive.

I was feeling guilty and embarrassed — like I’d done something wrong, so when the manager said, “No problem. Make yourself comfortable.”, I felt a little better — though guilty for not being reprimanded for my involvement.

A few people came up to me afterwards — one of them was the guy who almost got hit in the head with my mouse. He was pretty fired up — and basically said, “It’s a good thing he didn’t hit me with that mouse or I woulda’ done a lot more than you did!” which I thought was funny.

They all mentioned how calm I seemed — and how much of an ass that guy was — and “Good for you! Good for you for sticking up to that @#%^#”. I didn’t know what to say — it was a weird thing to hear. I didn’t feel like I’d done a good thing — I felt like all I’d done was make a situation worse by contributing to it. I’d make a conscious choice not to walk away at the beginning and avoid everything that followed.

They also mentioned that someone else who was near by got the whole thing on video.

One of the guys said they overheard the man’s wife (who was there the whole time and did nothing but stare at her laptop) tell the manager that her husband was just under a lot of pressure at work.

Anyway, it wasn’t until I opened up my laptop that I realized it had become completely unresponsive (still on, black screen — and hadn’t hibernated). And it wouldn’t boot — the operating system was non-existent. For the next 24 hours I did everything I could to try to access the drive — trying many different recovery programs. I finally came to the conclusion it was dead (as did the software I tried to use to recover data from it).

For what it’s worth — I’m not particularly proud of any of this. While some have suggested it was a good thing that I stood up to the guy, it’s difficult for me to see it that way, because nothing “good” came of it — there were no “winners” and my laptop was damaged.

Yes, he was being a bully — but I had the opportunity to simply walk away, but I didn’t. Instead, I made the situation worse by participating in it — albeit, very calmly.

Then again, there was something satisfying in answering “Yes” when he was towering over me asking if I was really calling him a jackass.

Post follow up:

Regarding not having the police called:

At the time I was asked, all I could think of was just letting the incident go and forgetting about it. It was not a fun experience. My chest hurt. I felt like I’d done something wrong. And thinking about having to interact more with the man — or simply dragging it out legally didn’t appeal to me at all.

But I also didn’t realize he’d done serious damage to my laptop. If I’d known, I may have changed my mind.

As it was, the man was already gone when I was asked about calling the police — and I didn’t even have his name, let alone his contact information.

Regarding my lost data:

Fortunately, I have my most important files backed up to the cloud — but that’s only about 25GB between Google drive/Dropbox/Sugarsync — and I keep all my photos, project files, etc. on portable drives.

I still lost about 250GB of data, but mostly just a ton of time in having to search, find, install, and set-up preferences, etc. for new installs.

This is actually the second laptop I’ve lost in as many years (last year I destroyed my mobile workstation with coffee). I replaced it with a cheap, low powered HP laptop (the one that was just damaged) — which, in retrospect, was a mistake.

In any case, I replaced the damaged drive and “hacked” an OS onto it using the recovery partition from of a drive from my old dead laptop (the one I killed with coffee) — also an HP (but was running Vista, not Win7 — and HP doesn’t offer Vista drivers for laptops they sold with Win7 (at least not this one) so there are some issues).

I’m writing this blog post from this laptop — so at least it’s good for something.

Rather than try to get this laptop running at 100% again (which I’m not sure is possible without proper OS discs and drivers), I bit the bullet and ordered an adequately featured laptop using a 33% off coupon — (one of the slickdeals.net deals of the day). It arrives in a couple weeks — and after I go through the process of getting all the software I need working, I aim to make the most of it — I absolutely  have to.

This purchase puts me in a precarious position budget/resources-wise — so I will likely be selling some camera gear on Amazon or ebay to help offset the cost.

“You’ll never know if you don’t go. You’ll never shine if you don’t glow.” – Smash Mouth

“What you seek is seeking you.” — Rumi

Hey folks! –

If you’re interested in having an active role in some of the behind-the-scenes decision making involved with ZDXP (and future projects), I encourage you to join the new ZDXP Discussion Group (ZCrew) on Facebook.

Why create a group when I already have a page?

Groups are a lot easier to have discussions on — plus I wanted to create a barrier between what gets posted on the ZDXP page and the behind-the-scenes discussions that take place in the group.

“Live with intention. Walk to the edge. Listen hard. Practice wellness. Play with abandon. Laugh. Choose with no regret. Appreciate your friends. Continue to learn. Do what you love. Live as if this is all there is.” — Mary Anne Radmacher

“I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’ what they call ‘living,’ I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.” — Jack Kerouac

Details…

Areas featured in the video include:

• Montana
• Bryce, Utah
• Redwood National Park
• Joshua Tree National Park
• Zion National Park
• Pacific Coast Highway (northern California)
• Sequoia National Park
• Arches National Park
• Snowy pass (northern California)
• Yellowstone National Park
• Iowa
• Mesa Verde National Park
• Sunset Crater National Monument
• Northern California
• Bryce, Utah
• Montana
• Zion National Park

The song (licensed) is called “The Beautiful Savage” by MilkmanDan and it was the whole inspiration for the design of the video.

The videos were shot with a GOPRO HD on top of my 2002 Toyota 4Runner.

The video was made in After FX using a $299 low-res laptop without a dedicated graphics card. If I had a better laptop, I would’ve had a bit more patience in adding a bit more visual polish.

None of the speeds of any of the videos have been adjusted.

See the map of my road trip so far on TravellersPoint.

“There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they’re necessary to reach the places we’ve chosen to go.” — Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever

“Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” — Walt Disney

“Being a geek is all about being honest about what you enjoy and not being afraid to demonstrate that affection. It means never having to play it cool about how much you like something. It’s basically a license to proudly emote on a somewhat childish level rather than behave like a supposed adult. Being a geek is extremely liberating.” — Simon Pegg