Is it just me-or does anyone else think that public behaviour getting ruder?

Yesterday I wanted to make an enquiry at the supermarket phone shop. My phone contract expires in a month or so and there are areas I’d like to improve. The booth was busy-one assistant taken up with a ragged group of browsers, the other moved to help the woman in front of me. This was a woman in a wheelchair whose mobility problems were severe enough for her to have special requirements in a phone. I waited. The lady suggested I take her place as she would be some time but I was more than happy to wait and took up a position behind the chair.

A middle aged man walked into the booth followed by a young girl. He strode to the counter-inserting himself between the wheelchair and the desk; he talked directly to the assistant serving the woman-even though he was engaged in unwrapping a box for her.

‘Excuse me’ I ventured. The man turned to me and said something incomprehensible which, when repeated became ‘I need his voice’. Need his voice? What was he-some kind of radio special effects collector? An advertising director looking for a voiceover artist? A patient wanting a transplant?

The assistant, inexperienced in the ways of customer service, stopped his unwrapping and made an immediate and ill-advised decision to deal with the man. By now I could feel annoyance welling up like indigestion and threatening to belch out. The woman sat impassive throughout; no doubt she is accustomed to such crass treatment, which is telling in itself.

The assistant left the counter and went to the store room. He’d abandoned both the wheelchair lady and me in favour of the rude, boorish man.

I waited until the man had left before telling the hapless assistant what I thought, though once he’d apologised and acknowledged the error I relented. The woman in the chair was, she explained, going to be a long time and would I go first?

Later, as I was driving home a Range Rover driver behind my car flashed his headlights continually for about a mile because I’d had the audacity to enter a roundabout ahead of him. Presumably he owns all the roundabouts. In a similar incident on the motorway a couple of days ago the passenger of a vehicle overtaking our van opened the window and gesticulated graphically because we’d had the boldness to encroach on the overtaking lane ourselves . Perhaps the driver of this car is the proprietor of all overtaking lanes?

Road rage, queue rage, shop rage, trolley rage-no waiting, no ‘after you’, no holding doors, no surrendering seats, no thank-you…

Perhaps it is, after all simply a case of becoming older, less noticeable but more noticing, but how dispiriting this witnessing of deteriorating social skills is! –or am I even more of a grumpy old woman than I’d realised?