Pushing Buttons

I love trivial drama. The pettier the better. If someone is freaking out on the train or in a drunken row with their significant other outside a bar, I am the gape-jawed idiot standing transfixed. There's something powerful about that little switch that flips where a person eschews decorum in favor of exorcising their frustrations. Today I had the pleasure of not only seeing someone get worked up, but having advanced notice of it.

The building I work in has two elevator banks to access the 23 floors but it's a busy building. Rarely can you get to where you're going without a few stops and it's easy to forget which way you're headed. So today a few of us were going up from a meeting on 15 back to our desks on 20. When the elevator doors opened on 16, a guy entered who I could tell was headed down to the ground floor and in a hurry.

A nicer person than me might have warned him that we were going the opposite direction but I was dying to see how pissed he'd be. Sadly, it was only about a 3.5. When the elevator started skyward, he halfheartedly threw his hands up in frustration and shook his head but hardly the meltdown I had tickets for.

My aggrevation fascination is likely rooted in my own short fuse of an Irish temper. As I've warned people who had the pleasure of living with me, the comparative level of anger to annoyance is usually set on 12x magnification. The flipside is that I get it out of my system and can joke about it with those who are, by that point, already laughing at me. It's at those moments when I should look around for a guy standing there staring in amazement and give him a knowing nod. That guy knows what I'm talking about.