General public and the rise in aggressive behaviour towards people just doing a job - DH job as an example

[Picklemeyellow]

My dh has been working in the same job for over 30 years.

He is a road engineer and although he very much enjoys the job and has a great relationship with his colleagues he is finding the general public to be a complete pain in the arse.

He says the aggression towards them is becoming an almost daily occurrence. This never happened years ago and he says he has seen this steadily rising over the last 5+ years or so.

It is becoming such a problem that the company he works for is offering the employees who work on the road, the use of body cameras. They also attend regular safety training and learn how to diffuse confrontational situations.

Road closures appear to cause the biggest rise in aggression. These closures are planned in advanced and in most cases the local residents will have been notified via letter etc. It goes without saying these closures are done so to protect the public from harm, there could be exposed electrical cables and large holes left in the road etc.

However, there are always the few who will truly believe they are above the rules and regulations and feel they should be ‘let through just this once’ and when these people realise the rules can not be bent just for them they often go ballistic - shouting and swearing is the most common (they are often being called Fucking Cunts and Arseholes).

One guy went crazy, ran back to his car, produced his lunch box and proceeded to hurl his sandwich, sausage rolls and chocolate bar at them (what a knob!).

Another work colleague once had a bottle of urine thrown at him!

The best one was a woman who announced that she was going to drive through the road closure regardless of the fact DH had told her there was a massive hole in the road further down and she would absolutely not be able to get through. She totally ignored him, drove past him whilst swearing and muttering. She arrived at said hole and realising DH was in fact correct and she would not be able to get through she proceeded to drive up the adjacent grass embankment, failing to see the ditch on the other side, she drove straight down into the ditch ending up with her car on its side - what an absolute idiot.

They are the lighthearted stories though, what happens when it turns violent?

I just don’t understand why people are like this now. We hear constant stories of supermarket workers being verbally abused to the point they are also being offered body cameras.

People are just doing a job, trying to earn a living, they do not deserve to be abused whilst doing so.

I am 50 years old and worked many years in customer service but never have I recalled supermarket staff being abused at the rate they are now and I dare say the same goes for many areas of the public facing workforce.

What is happening to society, I personally find it concerning?

We are an atomised society. People feel no kinship to their fellow humans. Once people see themselves as above the rules or above sanction other people start doing it too.
Not sure what we can do but it’s horrible how distant we have become from each others humanity. I regularly see people behaving like this and it’s shocking. I moved schools due to mums fighting in the playground and swearing at the poor staff.

I live in a street with lots of crime and antisocial behaviour and it’s affecting how I feel about people. I’m not horrible but I’ve stopped making an effort to be pro social, as it feels like there’s no point trying to make anything nicer, having planted front garden or hassling the council about things being fly tipped if the other people that benefit are those robbing your car or setting off fireworks in the street. As soon as rot sets in to people and their behaviour it’s hard to change.

I think this is at the crux of it. So many people are under so much pressure all the time. And also, things seem so hopeless in many ways. Public services eroded, the environment suffering, war, covid, and no political party seems ready to tackle any of it, least of all the utterly useless shower we have to suffer in government at the moment. Instead, they do nothing but seek to scapegoat people and set people against one another. None of that excuses people behaving badly, but I think it goes some way to explaining it.

Dealing with the NHS does make me want to scream. I finally did in the A&E - I had to be loud to get a chance to live. I don't feel sorry or ashamed about it (as it got me help that wasn't forthcoming for 14 hours), I feel sorry for myself - to be reduced to such a helpless, quivering, humiliating state by borderline evil staff.

I was also confrontational and "rude" to a builder who tried to scam me out of my last 10k to make the house watertight. I remember saying that he should be ashamed to call himself a builder, that he should be ashamed when looking in the mirror and that his wife should be ashamed to lay next to him at night. And I still stand by it.
I bet I'm now one of "those" customers as far as his stories to his family go.

We don't just have naaaice people in the service industry - it's a two way street.

I think the answer to “why now?” is down to how miserable and on edge so many people feel.

So, the type of awful behaviour that used to be confined to the poverty-stricken, stressed and marginalised “wrong-uns” on the edges of society is now seen more widely - because more people are suffering from the stress and mental ill-health that used to be confined to a tiny minority.

I happen to think that one of the core reasons for the increase in stress is the long-term impact of covid and lockdowns. It was a traumatic time for a lot of people, but now it’s all been brushed under the carpet and people don’t have the tools to deal with their complex feelings.

I remember decades ago reading about the massive society-wide issue of rage related behaviour in the decades after WWII. Due to complex trauma that was just ignored and not ever resolved.

It’s not remotely acceptable to be abusive, of course. What is frustrating though, is to be unable to get anywhere in a straightforward way, because of diversions and road closures, particularly when there is no one actually working on the site. Sometimes it seems as though there is no route out of our village. We’ve never had written warning either, just a difficult to read yellow sign by the side of the road.

One set of roadworks took three years.

I’m a teacher. The abuse is relentless - pupils, parents, the media - even here on MN. Sometimes it feels inescapable.

Obviously nobody should be attacked for doing their job but i personally am fed up with having to go an extra 20-25 minutes (so all that extra petrol) with no advanced notice and not an emergency either. Yes I have asked can I get past, and sometimes they have let me (and I couldn't work out why the road was closed)

What on earth causes mums to fight in the playground at pick up?

@dontbenastyhaveapasty i think that’s a really good point about collective trauma.
although folks saying things take too long, I don’t think things do take ages, except a&e/call centres maybe. I read a really interesting book by (I think) Oliver Burkeman which said actually most things are now so quick and “on demand” this reduces people’s tolerance to any perceived delay.

Oh delicious schadenfreude at the silly woman driving her car into a ditch 🙄😂. Obviously I hope she wasn't hurt or anything. I'm not a monster.

Life is rough atm. Everyone is overworked and money doesn't go very far. Even when you do save up for a lovely experience/holiday it'll all go wrong because of air traffic control issues/security issues/too.many.fucking.people...sigh. I feel like hibernating most of the time atm.

I work in a secondary school and there is tension in the air all the time. Not just the kids either. It's the overworked, frazzled adults and angry parents. Behaviour is worse and parents are needier than ever.

Everything is just a bit shit these days I think, always a convoluted newfangled system to navigate, incompetence is rife and awful service providers.
People have learnt that if you shout and make a pain of yourself you get sorted out quicker most of the time and they've learnt it from their own parents usually.

I’m sadly not surprised. You dont even need to look beyond Mumsnet to see that respectful discourse has gone out of the window these days.

People seem to just immediately class people that don’t agree with them or with what they want to do as the enemy. There’s too much hate.

I work for a local Council and if you think I actually have any say in anything that goes on either in this Council or the government then let me tell you that I had to complain for 3 months to get a flickering lightbulb changed in my office, so I can’t change any policies, I can’t get someone to sort out your damp and mould tomorrow and I can’t tell the bin man to go back and pick up your bin.
I literally have a standard letter than I can send and no more. Don’t yell at me. Yell at someone who gets paid a hell of a lot more than me.

I think it's because there don't seem to be consequences for poor behaviour anymore. The police are under resourced and overstretched, so that deterrent has pretty much gone. Most people don't want to get involved if something bad happens, because they worry they might get hurt themselves (and you can't really blame them). There isn't really the same sense of shame about doing things you shouldn't anymore.

I think a lot of it is because the social contract has broken down. It is no longer the case that hard work pays, unfortunately. The eye watering cost of housing and cost of living means that some people who work really hard will still end up living in a bedsit, struggling to pay bills. It is disheartening, to put it mildly.

Housing seems to be the golden thread that runs through everything. It is simply too expensive, and there isn't enough left over for many people to enjoy a decent standard of living. The social contract under which you can expect a decent standard of living for doing the 'right thing' by working hard has been broken. Why participate politely in a society in which the other end of the bargain hasn't been met?

I see this a lot in my job working on the railway, especially when I train is late or its coming up to a strike, I also see a lot of aggressive behavior towards innocent members of the public, I got called into the office only a few weeks ago for asking a man to leave the train because he was making 2 schoolgirls feel uncomfortable,you certainly need to have your Witt's about you these days especially in public facing jobs

I did a project along these lines a while ago and some of the abuse customer service people were on the receiving end of made me feel sick. A woman in a call centre was told they hoped she was raped and murdered and on another occasion, that her children would die of cancer. A man who worked at a train station was regularly told people would throw him on the tracks in front of a train, just because theirs had been cancelled or they had missed the last one. They weren’t one off incidents, it was happening on a weekly basis and utterly revolting.

There are some adults who have been brought up being told that they are the most special child ever to have been born. And once they get to adulthood and they aren't king/queen of the world they get the hump big time.

Now we have (largely fake) social media where it looks like many of our peers have better everything people get jealous and that leads to anger.

No one us prepared to leave a bit earlier to adjust to road closures.

No one spends time just thinking about bigger issues. Or has the manners/social skills to talk to other people in a decent manner.

Or spends time thinking if they are the problem.

Giving way on the roads is weakness and there is nothing worse, if people aren't afraid of you who exactly are you?

Perhaps the parents never taught them manners.

Being an arsehole isn't going to suddenly make your health/money/family worries go away. But if you make someone feel scared, or small, or in the wrong then you aren't at the bottom of the heap. Except you are, you really are you are in the sludge but you are just far too dumb to understand that.

I mean throwing sausage rolls! Get those body cameras on, get them up on YouTube let's see the sludge in action!

I think we can safely say that some people are reverting back to early man with their behaviour, swearing and abuse /grunting and using clubs/ weapons. Throw in covid lockdown, reality crap on television and social media shit behaviour and you have the perfect moron

Don't suppose it has anything to do with the lack of discipline in schools, we have had no effective form of discipline in schools since the early 80s. And of course the many hours people spend on SM doesn't help either.

What sort of person carries a bottle of urine with them ???
First thing I noticed on return after living outside the UK for 20 years was how rude and self centred people had become. Did the “ me, me, I’m so important” culture come from social media, reality TV? Though that wouldn’t explain elderly rude people as they’d be less involved in those.

There is no excuse for abusing people who are just doing their job.

I can see why people are becoming more frazzled though, with shorter fuses. The pace of life and its pressures have increased so much in the last few years, everything is so crowded, pressured and expensive. It takes ages to get anywhere, so you're often late, and then the bloody road is closed and you have to take a detour that makes you even later (again, I'm not excusing the abuse the OP's DH gets for being the poor sod who has to man the closure, although I laughed at the twat who threw his lunch at him).

But I think everyone is feeling squeezed, no one has enough time or enough money any more, everything has to be booked and paid for in advance and that's if you can even get an appointment or a ticket or whatever in the first place. And all that pressure is making people angry and frustrated and fed up and the result is the epidemic of rudeness, abuse and horrible, entitled behaviour that we're all witnessing.

@MrsMarzetti discipline should start and end at home.

Teachers should be there to teach and dish out appropriate punishment according to the school rules not potty train, not teach already feral kids how to behave.

I think people could , in the past, send a big bloke (friend) or two round to the troublemakers house and warn them to sort themselves out.
Also, if someone got aggressive with you and you were fit enough you could kick them in the balls and tell them to fuck off.
Sadly now you would be the one dragged off to the cells. And there is a risk the other person is armed.
This is the change imv -human rights and the legal system leaves the ordinary person at the mercy of thugs and idiots.

It's why religion was invented. Christianity is very unpopular on Mumsnet but its central tenet is: love thy neighbour as thyself. And the real killer is: everyone is thy neighbour.

I’m finding that quality of service in all walks of life have gone downward accordingly. I’m not someone that would shout at a staff member but over the last month Boots pharmacy have pushed me to the very limit of my politeness. And they are by no means alone.

Lack of any apology for long waiting times, staff errors and repeated inconvenience due to incompetence/failing computer systems. Just a shrug and an indication that you should bugger off and deal with the fallout elsewhere.

I don’t condone the poor behaviour of ‘the public’ - but when the triggers are constant and coming from every angle, I can see why people who are naturally rude have become exceptionally rude.

The real question is, as rude inconsiderate behaviour, breeds rude inconsiderate behaviour - how will we rein it back in as a society?