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...or "Big Ishoo" or "Bigishu" or "Bishue" or whatever it is. And chuggers (=charity muggers, for the uninformed... workers contracted out by agencies who accost you on the street and preach about Amnesty/Help The Aged/Blind Dyslexic Nymphomaniacs/whatever). Here's why I ignore them and walk past them as if they aren't there.
Near where I work, there's a street market, Chapel Street Market. It's a pretty typical London day-to-day street market. If you watch Eastenders, it's pretty much the only thing they get right. Unless the Agricultural at the end of the street is the focus of intense personal battles over its ownership, with, literally, blood on its walls attesting to this fact, us day-to-day punters who just want their pint don't notice at all. But it's a street market, open stalls, stallholders all stood there some of them calling out about the quality/value of their merchandise. Yet if I walk along Chapel Street, none of them are really that bothered that I don't pay them any attention, they know I'm just another punter who's not interested and that one who will, will be along soon enough.
I apply this same "I'm not interested in what you're selling/pushing" attitude that I do to the market traders (who don't mind) to Big Issue sellers/chuggers (who seem to - in the way that their eyes and/or words follow you, as if it's the greatest crime ever to just walk past them without even a glance in their direction). As if I'm a bad person for ignoring them, as if they're different from any other street trader in a society and an economy where choice, and the freedom to express that choice, is apparently everything.
I used to think that I was desensitized to this kind of bleeding heart approach to selling (and the chuggers are selling, as they're invariably on some sort of commission). Now I just think I'm excersising choice, and I don't understand why those who are pushing their good/services don't get what I'm doing.
Near where I work, there's a street market, Chapel Street Market. It's a pretty typical London day-to-day street market. If you watch Eastenders, it's pretty much the only thing they get right. Unless the Agricultural at the end of the street is the focus of intense personal battles over its ownership, with, literally, blood on its walls attesting to this fact, us day-to-day punters who just want their pint don't notice at all. But it's a street market, open stalls, stallholders all stood there some of them calling out about the quality/value of their merchandise. Yet if I walk along Chapel Street, none of them are really that bothered that I don't pay them any attention, they know I'm just another punter who's not interested and that one who will, will be along soon enough.
I apply this same "I'm not interested in what you're selling/pushing" attitude that I do to the market traders (who don't mind) to Big Issue sellers/chuggers (who seem to - in the way that their eyes and/or words follow you, as if it's the greatest crime ever to just walk past them without even a glance in their direction). As if I'm a bad person for ignoring them, as if they're different from any other street trader in a society and an economy where choice, and the freedom to express that choice, is apparently everything.
I used to think that I was desensitized to this kind of bleeding heart approach to selling (and the chuggers are selling, as they're invariably on some sort of commission). Now I just think I'm excersising choice, and I don't understand why those who are pushing their good/services don't get what I'm doing.
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