We’ve all met people in our lives who have rubbed us the wrong way. For whatever reason, these people say or do things that just absolutely irritate the rest of the world. As a child, I didn’t notice it that much. Sure, there were some pretty rude kids I went to school with, but there was never an overwhelming sense of negative vibes.

As an adult, my world has been flipped upside down. I have several interactions DAILY with people who seem to be oblivious to the word. It’s that, or they just don’t give a darn about anyone else. Either way, it’s incredibly irritating for those of us who try to live our lives in a positive environment.

I bet you’re wondering if I’m just referring to the high school aged primadonnas that I work with every day. Some of my negative interactions are with them – but 9 times out of 10, these encounters are actually with adults. Sometimes they are adults who are my age, and sometimes they’re much older than me, but one thing is clear: someone murdered common courtesy.

You know the people I’m taking about, right? They drive me absolutely crazy. They have no sense of what it means to be polite to others. They expect you to treat them like royalty while they treat you with absolutely no respect at all. When did the world decide that it was OK to push others around? Because I know I wasn’t invited to that meeting…

Here are some of the prime examples I’m talking about:

• My husband and I LOVE going to the theater! It’s actually a big part of what brought us together. It’s one of our biggest shared interests and I look forward to every show we either see or act in together. As an actor, there’s nothing more irritating to me than someone who sits on their phone. Seriously? You paid money to be here and you’re going to sit on your phone playing Angry Birds? We often attribute this behavior to teenagers – but I’ve got news for you: some of the biggest culprits are old people! I’ll bet you that 90% of the time when we’re at the theater, the person next to me who has a glowing face is an older person. In my opinion, someone who should know better. But it’s just us millennials who are rude, right?
• Last night, I was playing with my daughter. She loves to be chased around the apartment, and then she’ll chase me. Apparently, the downstairs neighbors did not appreciate this. Mind you, we’ve been living in our apartment for almost three and a half months now and I have only met the husband downstairs once – I’ve never seen the wife. We’ve never had a single interaction that was negative. Instead of coming up and telling us that we were being too loud, the wife decided that the “adult” way to handle the situation was to scream and then literally hit the ceiling of her apartment – our floors were literally shaking. My husband went downstairs – to be the ACTUAL adult in the situation – and apologize if we were being too loud. The neighbors said they could hear everything. Uh, no duh. Guess what, lady? I can also hear your TV playing loudly at 12 am when my daughter is trying to sleep – but you don’t hear me slamming on the floor and throwing a tantrum! He apologized again and they told him that the previous family who lived there was very disrespectful and told them that they would just have to deal with the noise. Hey, lady? I’m not your former neighbor. I’m sorry if you had crappy neighbors in the past, but my husband and I are very easy to get along with. You don’t get to treat us like crap just because your last neighbors didn’t care about your comfort in your own home. Had you come up like an actual adult and told us that we were being too loud, I would have profusely apologized. But now that you’ve been an absolute terror, I don’t ever want to deal with you again.

I realize that I’ve gone on an absolute rant, but seriously. Who killed common courtesy? What kind of world are we living in that we think it’s OK to treat other people like they are less than us? In what kind of world is it OK to spew hateful jargon about women, minorities, and the LGBTQ community?

I’m left with a line from the musical “Chicago” – “Nobody’s got no class.” It’s time that we start working together and treating each other like we are civilized human beings. Hold the door for someone. Complement each other. Offer a shoulder to cry on for those in need. Quit. Being. Bullies.

All I can say is – we’d all better say a prayer that the ghost of common courtesy graces us with her presence. We all really need a little more of it in the world.