To the woman who did not say thank you when I held the door for her:

Really? Really. REALLY?

You know I saw you see me, right? I saw you see me.

In case the incident wasn’t as memorable to you as it was to me, here’s how it went down:

I opened the bathroom door. You were wiping your hands on a paper towel, getting ready to use said paper towel as to not taint your delicate hands on the germy door. To save you the small yet significant inconvenience of opening the door, I held it open for you.

And here is where society as we know it fell apart.

Your eyes slid over in my general direction. I held the door, smiling and waiting. Waiting in vain for a THANK YOU THAT NEVER APPEARED. Because you sailed out the door without so much as a nod.

There I was, smiling like a fool with my folksy, corn-fed Midwestern manners. Wasting valuable face muscles. Face muscles that I could have used to do other things, like chew corn and yell at the Buckeyes.

And it’s not like the bathroom was wall-to-wall women, bustling with feminine chatter and chaos, and in all the confusion you forgot to say thank you.

No. It was just the two of us, wasn’t it? Two women in an almost empty building, drawn together by biology. We should have been comrades, you and I.  At the very least we should have given each other the “office greeting.” You know what I mean. The generic things you say to an office coworker you don’t know. “Is it Friday yet?” is a popular example.

But no. No acknowledgment of the extra seconds and mouth muscles I set aside just so your precious fingers wouldn’t touch the bathroom door. Nothing.

Just the breeze as you kept walking, right past my arm—the arm supporting the door that allowed you to leave the bathroom. Taking with you the tiny, sad remains of polite society and leaving the extinction of human decency in your wake. That’s all.

Oh, and by the way? Those pants were NOT FLATTERING on you.

Pingle out.