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?

Not excusing the abuse at all, but I think people are at the end of their tethers. We're all being squeezed from all angles and seems there's no way out, the country feels like it's falling apart. There's constant delays and disruption and "maintenance" which is more like fighting a forest fire with a water pistol. There's just so much at the moment to push those with a short fuse over the edge.

I live near and work daily in a suburb of London notorious for violence and ‘broken Britain-ness’ I’d always thought my very different form the norm experience was due to being rarely out at night, shocking that so many posters in rescue and charities are experiencing the same. I do notice that everyone is on the edge.
Is there anyone here in Australia atm? My experience 20 years ago was of an excessively courteous society- and I felt the same this summer in the states to my great surprise.
To those who feel threatened and disregarded at work- there’s no excuse.

@Picklemeyellow

there is o my one solution.
more cops, nightingale courts and zero tolerance to this and shoplifting etc.

is caused by stress to many people and lack of investment for decades.

time these brexit looser Tory’s are out.

no has respect cos there are mo consequences

Maybe if elderly people are rude it's because they remember a time when going about your day-to-day business wasn't such a time consuming ballache. When stuff just, I dunno, worked

A time when you could call the doctor and get an appointment, when shops had staff on the tills, when trains actually ran at the weekend, when the road outside wasn't dug up for the fucking 5th time this year, when call centre staff were in the UK and you didn't need to spell out your first name even though it was Mary. I could go on...

A lot of it is a mental heath epidemic. A lot of people unwell and untreated.

The police giving the streets up obviously doesn't help (neither does all the police cuts from our wonderful Tory overlords).

This is why I have some sympathy with police officers (while fully accepting there are some who absolutely should have never been allowed to join the force) - imagine this behaviour not just as a one-off but every single working day. Someone screaming in your face and threatening to rape your children isn't a shocking anecdote you relate on a forum/social media because it sticks in your mind for years after, it's just Monday. No wonder they get de-sensitised.

While there are definitely concerns about trial-by-public-shaming, I can also see the benefits. I don't think people have overall become ruder or more nasty internally - I think most people were always like that under a very thin veneer of civilisation. Just look back to covid and people stealing the last loo roll off the shelves despite having stockpiles back home, or the videos of huge black friday sales and people fighting for a reduced tv. Even back in what we think of as a 'golden age' of manners it would be absolutely acceptable for someone 'upper class' to be incredibly rude to a lower class person without any come back. Or for an adult to be aggressive towards a child. Or to say things we would now condemn as extreme racism with nobody around batting an eye.

The only reason people managed to restrain themselves was when they felt they had something to lose - perhaps they felt embarrassed to behave like that in small local communities where everyone knew each other, or at work where their prospects of promotion could be affected .

I imagine if you showed a video of the man in OPs example throwing his lunch at road workers to his friends or colleagues he'd be mortified. Which is perhaps why bodyworn cameras can be a good idea - particularly the ones that show what is being recorded. It's a similar idea to having a mirror behind a service counter - it's hard to keep screaming when you have a full and clear view of how ridiculous you look.

Totally agree. My point is that if the person you see most of in "authority" can't discipline you then you will never learn to have respect for anyone that has to tell you what to do. Teachers are the first authority children come face to face with outside the home.

I think there's some great points on this thread, about stress, about standards of living, social infrastructure, unresolved lockdown trauma, about political hopelessness, the role of social media and the Oliver Burkeman thing about our tolerance for slow having gone. I do agree with you about religion as well. It does provide a moral base from which to judge your own actions - a counter to both the selfishness but also some of the made-up pressures of modern living. Really thought provoking. Good thread, OP!

@Mycatsgoldtooth atomised is a very good description.

I feel that our social culture has radically changed since my childhood. We had a more authoritarian world and there was a general acceptance of soft authority that has completely disappeared. A cinema usher pointing her torch at someone in the cinema would have been effective at deterring unruly patrons; now no minimum wage worker would take a risk.

At the same time people are much less caring in their jobs and (even though I’m sighing at how old I sound saying this) no one takes pride in their jobs. That adds enormously to daily frustrations. I hesitate to order things online because 50% of the time what is delivered is the wrong size, amount and I have to trudge into the store anyway.

We live with elevated levels of suspicion, afraid to let our dc wander and play out, wary of people that previous generations would have trusted implicitly because of scandals. Covid exacerbated the mistrust and people still harbour resentment for how others responded to the rules. We have no safe idols or heroes, can’t trust our leaders to do the right thing.

Just as we were all daring to hope and breathe again after Covid that arsehole Putin plunged the world back into crisis, and fuel prices and cost of living is soaring to a terrifying degree.

And then of course there’s social media, that polarises every issue and a rampant cancel culture that exaggerates every difference of opinion until we can only see our differences.

All against the backdrop of looming planetary extinction and the insidious message that the problem is too many people. Other people.

And while I’m not for a moment condoning people’s behaviour, I recognise that it’s not without context.

I think @Doingmybest12 has it.

Life is incredibly stressful at the moment. Everything is expensive and people are worried about paying the bills. Nothing seems to work as it should. Trains are cancelled; roads are snarled up; you can't get a GP appointment when you are ill. If you have an issue with a service it is difficult if not impossible to talk to a human who can actually resolve it rather than a bot sending messages from a script. The climate crisis is always there in the background as an existential threat.

No safety net anymore...

No nhs to speak of

Police doing fuck all

The polite veneer of society was always thin

I think there is a much lower standard of behaviour and manners now which has become acceptable with the addition of people becoming more afraid to intervene and challenge it due to the threat of violence/weapons being used/and lack of community where people stand together and look out for each other.

When people get away with this behaviour it is compounded that they can and emboldens them further. In yon olden days, people wouldn’t behave like that due to embarrassment and not wanting people to think badly of them. When teens did, they’d get a clip round the ear.

We have a much better standard of living these days, even the poorest in society do compared to 50-60 years ago when there was little in the way of financial aid, social or mental health support and life was much harder. Walking miles with no car, a whole day doing household chores, cooking was the norm rather than takeaways, fewer home comforts like central heating, Netflix, etc. It’s much easier to navigate life today with all the time reducing tools we have (don’t even have to leave home to pay bills or do shopping), and you can find out how to do literally anything via the internet but you wouldn’t find the level of bad behaviour and lack of courtesy and manners back then that you do today.

There was probably much more generational trauma after the WW1 and 2 for the 40-50 years afterwards as well.

I personally think lack of physical exercise/labour to relive stress and tension is key as well as breakdown in family/community support so people feel more isolated and have less tolerance for other people so act out accordingly.

If you live anywhere near HS2 building I'm not surprised. My town has effectively become a cut off island due to inept planning. Rationally I know it's not the workers but my 3 mile commute now has 5 sets of temporary lights and has gone from taking 7 minutes to 20 per day. I'm pissed off about it and there's no sign of it ending.

We live on county borders and the county highways clearly don't speak to each other and shut roads at the same time, gridlocking the place.

I'm not surprised people are rude. It's fucking annoying.

@tokennamechange thats a very good point about the veneer of civilisation. Reading over my post it sounds like I’m harking back to a golden age and I’m really not - so much needed to change and be challenged.

But we’re horribly disconnected

I had review panel a few weeks ago regarding a feral child

Parents just did not want to know. Total denial of behaviour and laughable lies and accusations about members of staff

Meeting ended with me being told to "fuck off"

There have always been individuals like this. But bad behaviour has increased.
I think it is because we have a very uncaring society these days culturally. Starting from the top everyone seems out for themselves.
And few seem to care about people who struggle. You see it on here in small ways. People saying tough if someone can't manage a parking app, they just need to learn.
I think it has created a divided society where many people are stressed and look out only for their own family.

Absolutely, there is no excuse at for this type of behaviour. I am currently stressed to the hilt and have numerous plates spinning in the air but I would never, ever take this out on anyone else.
I agree, life is very stressful but that will never be an excuse.

I was chatting about exactly this with a friend recently. To me it feels like an increasing disintegration of the social contract.

I also think that people are generally absolutely worn out and immensely frustrated by the collapse of public services, and overwhelmed by the feeling that everything is broken, and so perhaps everyone is now on a very short fuse.

Just to clarify, I don't think the factors I mentioned in my post by any means excuse this awful behaviour, but I wonder if they have contributed to it?

@running I agree with some of what you say. But in the past most people had people who would help them navigate systems. There would be car park attendants, more shop assistants, staff in your gas showroom and rent office. Now you get a long wait on the phone to a call centre and a worker who often can't deal with anything complex.
Complex transactions take me longer than they did in the past. And it was great to be able to check things with a parking attendant. For example there is no disabled space left is it OK if I park over two spaces so I can get wheelchair and DD out. Now days there is no one and it does make some things harder.

People have got much worse since Covid lockdowns and so many are feral. Loads on coke now as a daily thing and people just are so quick to fly off the handle. Some people have no shame and do not care that they shout in public or cause a scene but we were not brought up like that and grew up with respect for others. Also so many under a lot of stress with cost of living, food, bills etc and many have reached boiling point and seems to be getting worse. But then after saying that there are loads of lovely people and so nice when encounter those and lightens the mood to talk with people who are genuinely nice and decent.

Failing of the social contract is about right. It used to be that there was a safety net, but 13 years of the current iteration of the Tory party has shredded that. People are so much closer to the edge than they used to be and it takes so little for someone to fall right off. Everything seems to be made so hard - take having a disability and trying to get any kind of support as an example. We have been trying to negotiate this for our son, and it's clearly been made as deliberately difficult as possible. People in authority, people who should be - and claim to be - on the side of your child lie to your face, quite brazenly. The system is designed to trip you up at every turn. It's infuriating and exhausting and it always leaves me feeling drained and yes - angry. Take that as an example then multiply it over and over - that's how people end up feeling. And the people really responsible for it are miles away, cosseted in their helicopters and jets, while the rest of us are left to fight over scraps.

When that's your reality, your fuse is going to be short. That doesn't make it ok though.

It was a lorry driver. Lots of HGV drivers use empty bottles to urinate in, saves them having to stop. You can see the discarded bottles on the sides of motorways? - it’s grim 🤢

DH and I joke about going to live in an island because of this. I work in a school and the abuse from parents who expect to see their child’s tutor, head of year or the headteacher, on arriving at reception, is shocking. I say to them you don’t rock up to your Dr or any other institution and expect to be seen immediately while shouting the odds. We have a number of front line staff who are having to have support as the volume of abuse is so great.