I will admit it, I have become one of those kind of people! We always believe that it will never happen to us, but it’s true. I have become the kind of grouchy old fart that seems to have little patience for rudeness and stupidity, and there are times when I don’t hesitate to take people to task when they exhibit behavior that others might ignore. And there are sure a lot of clods out there who need it!
Actually, I’ve been this way for a long time, much to the occasional chagrin of my bride. Several years ago, we were parked at the outer edge of a WalMart parking lot with several other RVs, waiting to go into a rally the next morning. Parked nose to nose with us was a white Ford dually diesel pickup pulling a big fifth wheel. The owner had already exhibited a lack of RV etiquette by extending his slide room out into the driving lane, instead of pulling in facing the other direction, so that if he had to extend it, it would have been over the grass. Somebody mentioned that to him, and he said it was a big parking lot, people could drive around him.
He had a midsize dog, and took it for a walk, and it did its business right at the foot of our step. Once it had finished, the jerk just started back to his trailer, without cleaning up the mess. I called out to him, and told him that if he didn’t have a baggie to pick up the mess, I’d give him one. He just shrugged his shoulders and said “It’s biodegradable, it’ll wash away with the first rain.” I told him that, in the meantime, I had to step over it to get out of my RV and he said something to the effect of “So what?”
Well, even back then, Bad Nick was lingering just beneath the surface of civility, so he grabbed a baggie, scooped up the big pile of poo, and mashed it right down on the big, shiny hood of his truck! He hit the roof and started to raise hell, but ol’ Bad Nick just smiled back at him and said “It’s biodegradable, it’ll wash away with the first rain.”
Another time, we were in Lake City, Florida, and saw this rig parked in the local WalMart parking lot. This was a few days before Christmas, and the clod was not parked out on the edge of the lot, like one should be. No, he was in the regular parking lanes, taking up SEVEN spaces! Did I mention this was just before Christmas? To make matters worse, he had his jacks down, slide rooms out, and BBQ grill out. I stopped and took several pictures, and he asked if I liked his motorhome and trike. I told him no, that I owned the Gypsy Journal, and that I was going to print the picture in our next issue, so that when RVers could not park there any more, my readers would know why! That’s when he said he was only going to be there until the FMCA rally in Brooksville (which was still a month away!). Yeah, Bad Nick showed up again, and by the time the conversation was done, and we had finished our shopping, he was gone!
Bad Nick wasn’t in Box Elder, South Dakota a few weeks ago, when Sandra Swanson took this picture of a motorhome’s leveling jack stuck six inches or more deep. And of curse, when the folks left, they didn’t even bother to try and fill in the damage. Yeah, you could beak an ankle if you stepped in a hole that deep, but what the hell, that’s why you have two ankles, right? Yeah, Bad Nick would have had fun with that one too!
The Escapees RV Club has a Boondocking Etiquette Letter that they suggest members carry copies of to share with RVers who are breaking the basic rules of boondocking, such as using leveling jacks, using awnings, etc. There are times I think I probably should print some of them out to carry with us. But, in my personal experience, most of the people whom I have encountered who commit the worst offenses are not clueless newbies; they are almost always folks in upscale RVs who have been round a while, and many of them sport plaques and decals from most of the biggest RV clubs. They just don’t give a damn. I have had more than one of them tell me that it’s a public parking lot (no, it’s a private parking lot owned by WalMart or whoever), and/or that “I paid $250,000 (or whatever) for this thing, and I’ll park it wherever I damn well please!”
Yeah, I know. It makes me mad too. Rude, self-absorbed clods like this make all of us look bad. They are the reason more and more businesses no longer allow RVers to park overnight, and that more and more communities are passing laws banning the practice. Bad Nick has his work cut out for him. So many A-holes, so little time!
Thought For The Day – If I agreed with you, we’d both be wrong.
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Nick Russell
World-Famous, New York Times Best Selling Author, and All-Around Nice Guy!
Nick; Read and suggest this to your fowelers
“All I needed to know I learned in Kindergarden.”
Although I’m not so sure that these basic principals are of the mind set of our union based teachers today. It is a base of what was…..
Mark
OMG, you are too funny. I am still laughing. I love what you did to the guy who didn’t pick up after his dog. Great blog topic. Safe travels.
Though the technology changes, the psyche of the clod does not. I grew up in pre-Disney central florida. Winter Park was the southern end of the snow bird migration highway for the rich and old.
Many a day I fumed and ground my teeth over the Cadillac crowd’s apparent attitude that the price had included two parking spots wherever they wanted to stop, the centerline of the road was there to straddle and that narrow grocery isles were actually their personal conference rooms.
Decency is a state of mind…. which the self-entitled have clearly lost.
Mark, Mark, Mark …. how recently have you walked in the moccasins of one of those “union based teachers? Try it, you will have your clouded eyes opened.
Your dog “doo” story reminded me of when we first moved to our new house in 1972. A neighbor’s dog kept doing his business on our sidewalk right in front of our door. This was not a public sidewalk. It was the sidewalk a long way from the street that led from our driveway to our front door. After another neighbor’s daughter stepped in it while she and her mom were bringing us a welcome batch of cookies, I’d had it. I shoveled it up, walked across the street, and deposited it on their front step. My husband didn’t think this was the best way to handle the problem but we didn’t have any more dog “doo” on our walk after that.
Ha slob who let his dog do his stuff on my lawn and laughed about it till hje went to work in his nice expensive suit one morning and slid into his csr and discovered the seat was all doggie do never had a problim with him after that
How about the ones who walk their dog with very long (20ft. or more) leashes so that their little foo-foo goes into every site depositing his doo-doo. Then of course the owner never notices what little foo-foo just did and walks away without any attempt to pick up little foo-foo’s deposit!
These people are true J-E-R-K-S and can be found far too often, but fortunately they are still in the minority.
A number of years ago when I was on a one-place-to-another-in-a-hurry trip I pulled into a rest area late at night. I parked next to a fiver that had his living room slide out! A young guy came out as I was walking back to my trailer and asked if the reflectors he had on his slide had helped me avoid it!!!
I was too tired to get into the courtesy issues with him, probably should have.
And why more and more campgrounds are not allowing pets! Right as rain Nick!
These clods are alive and well in NY. As you said Nick when clods are informed of their wrongs they just care about themselves and no one else. Like Joyce I had a similar occurrence many years ago. I took appropriate action and never had any problems again from their dogs. I also have no problems bringing to task such clods at my local WM even though I know it won’t make a difference. What is needed is a web site where we could post pictures of all offenders. It might get their attention when one of their friends spots their rig on the web.
I’m finding myself becoming one of THOSE people too. Love the way you handled the dog poop guy. His face must have been priceless when he saw that his biodegradable stuff was now HIS problem. LOL
I get a kick out of the ones who dutifully carry a plastic bag with them as they walk their dogs through everybody’s campsite and when they return a half hour later the bag is still empty. I reckon they use the same bag every morning!
As is usual for just about any community, there are always a few idiots who ruin it for everyone else and give us all a bad name.
As dog owners who ALWAYS pick up after our pet, we just want to say not ALL dog owners are clods and to please give us the benefit of the doubt and not go hating on everyone who travels with a pet.
Nick’s situation, and the one’s we’ve read in the comments are some bad apples. We’ve run into them ourselves and have seen RVers do some despicable things (like a very expensive bus dumping their tanks in the parking lot of a rest stop, as just one example) and picked up more than our fair share of other people’s dog poo on too many occasions. But we all know that all of us RVers aren’t like that, and neither are dog owners. Please cut us some slack until you have reason to do otherwise.
Nick, I’m glad you’ve got the blog to post such total disregard for others. Good for you!
By the way, we made our shake down run with our new-to-us RV and….well, here’s the story of the trip and the aftermath. http://highlightofourtwilight.blogspot.com/
Check out this new solar powered dump station lock that I found at a Flying J in TN this week. Thanks to all the slob RVers that ruined the nice benefit Flying J used to offer. I posted pictures of it at the latter part of my blog post.
http://rsanityrvtravels.blogspot.com/2011/09/pain-at-dump.html
I hope you do realize that many of us live vicariously through Bad Nick. It’s the alter ego that we wish we could let out to play. As I’m getting older I have less and less of a “filter” before I speak, but I’m no where near your magnitude yet. I can only wait and hope!