Nothing makes me feel my age more acutely than when someone rides an electric scooter past me on the sidewalk. I may be a thirty-something woman any other time, but suddenly I am thirty-eight and ten months, muttering under my breath and clutching my handbag, mad about sharing the sidewalk with someone moving faster than I.
This aggravation of mine is completely irrational, as is often the case with things that irritate me. I’ve never been hit by a scooter. I’ve never even had a close call. They aren’t noisy, they don’t take up much space and they don’t make a mess. My dog isn’t bothered by them either, which means that the scooters aren’t inconveniencing me in the slightest.
For the most part, they stay in their lane and I stay in mine. And I think that’s the problem: The people on the scooters—the people in the other lane—are having fun and I am not. More to the point, for the first time in my life, I realize that I have no real business joining in.
I’ll admit it: I’m jealous of the scooter people.
Not of their beauty or their inherent coolness because, in fact, there’s nothing glamorous about riding one. As a general rule of thumb, anyone who looks good on an e-scooter looks even better when they’re not.
It’s more that when I see someone riding a Lime across two sets of trolley tracks and through a cobblestone parking lot, I see a person who is going somewhere they just can’t wait to be. For this person, time is of the essence! They have things to do—people and plans waiting for them. They are on a motorized vehicle and they still need to take a shortcut.
I, on the other hand, have a little more time on my hands. I am on my way to something completely optional, such as buying my 16th decorative throw pillow of the year or my second bottle of wine for the week. These, by the way, are the most exciting scenarios I can come up with. Far more often, I’m just on my way out to spend money in less fun ways, at the grocery store or a custom framing shop or, my new favorite, the pet store. All of this, I’m afraid, can wait.
Sometimes I like to convince myself that my irritation with scooters is actually a form of public service. I might not be concerned for my own safety when in the vicinity of one, but I am nervous on behalf of the rider—he or she who is barreling down the sidewalk, sans helmet, middle part to the wind.
But it doesn’t take long to expose my flawed logic. Two lines in and I am once again rounding the corner of Jealousy & Youth. It always comes back to the fun quotient. The scooter people are having it in spades and I have become a woman for whom going to the dentist and taking the dog to the vet qualifies as a “busy week.”
Don’t try to tell me that this is a problem that can be solved by riding a scooter. It can’t. Or more accurately, it should not.
I have aged out of the scooter bracket and I know that not from personal experience, but from careful observation. There is no manifestation of the mid-life crisis more pathetic than a person approaching 40 riding a rented e-scooter.
As a society, we give men a hard time for buying sports cars or boats, mocking them savagely, directly to their aging faces. But at least that behavior connotes a certain amount of success and disposable income. At least there’s a decent chance we’ll benefit too, with an occasional joyride or a lake tour. Not so with the scooter! There’s nothing in that experience for anyone other than the rider and even he’s on borrowed tires.
I take solace in the fact most of my social circle—which consists largely of people who own dogs that weigh more than 40 pounds—share my distaste for scooters. It’s a layer of our onion, right after talking about how long it takes to house-train a standard poodle and just before asking what it is they do for a living that allows them to be in the dog park at all hours of the day.
Hatred of scooters is that middle layer, the place where we gain trust and understanding of one another, where we establish that we are reasonable people with shared values. They are common ground, an easy mark. We claim that they are a nuisance, a hazard, one step up from litter. And yet, underneath all our complaining, all we really want is to be cool enough, young enough, brave enough to ride them.
We have scooters around here too. They’d probably be more of a target for my disdain, except someone came up with the idea of bike bars, on which a dozen people sit around a bar which they pedal down the street drinking and yelling “whoo” at everyone and singing along to 80s hair metal bands.
They are truly the scourge of our lifetime.
omg. i know. I KNOW. the bike bars are not here in helsinki but they are elsewhere in Europe. I have to say the only thing worse than a rowdy group of bike bar riders is a quiet group of riders. like, if you have ever seen one of those roll by and the people are not full-on screaming, it is the most eerie and concerning experience. honestly, every time, I’m like, “this is bad! he’s not going to make it to the altar.”