gf's guide to helping your fellow beings

There's no one else out there, lets face it, we're a small ball of rock floating around the sea of nothingness we call the universe. So we just have each other to deal with, connecting only through the means of language and laughter.

Unfortunately this act of human to human communication and etiquette seems to have passed me by on many occasions and I've managed to get myself in situations that I still regret to this day. You see, when a fellow unknown_entity approaches you in the hope that you will exchange your time to help them in their plight, it's probably a good idea you happily oblige. Like any normal human being would do.

However, this didn't seem to happen on one fateful night in our very own London-town, whilst walking along the much maligned southbank of the Thames, some young, supple American tourists approached us with a sense of hope and joy in their eyes. Their question was simple, being tourists in England, they had concerns about their fanny-packs being poked and robbed so they were wondering where they could get a Taxicab to transport them safely back to their intended destination.

The people I was with simply passed off the question with a polite "we're not local to here!" shrug and had already taken their first strides away, a universal message of indifference that is acceptable and uniformly English. Unfortunately for some reason I decided not to head down this route of politeness and courtesy, the thought processes in my brain had decided to push for the desire to help my new found foreign friends towards their goal. An amateur error in hindsight as the five word response that escaped my mouth was as follows

- "how about trying a road?"

The hopes, the dreams and the image of the modern English man washed away in the deep recesses of their eyes, the silence that followed was the most awful, haunting sound that still distresses me to this day. In this state of shock I began a brisk walk away from the crowd who were still trying to grasp the situation that had just occurred, the thought of apologising for my sarcastic and wholly unhelpful comment had never crossed my mind.

Perhaps the lesson is to pass on the help to someone who knows more or communicates better, but never, under any circumstances, ask your old buddy gf for help

it will only end in tears :' {