Oooh! I'm such a rebel

It has been said that older people take more risks because they no longer care about impressing anyone. Or maybe it's because we no longer fear the consequences.

Whatever.

Today on my way to a doctor's appointment, I dutifully turned off my cell phone because a sign on the lab wall said to. I could have been rebellious and left it on. It's not like it rings all that much anyway; I just use it for business calls - usually when I'm lost and need directions.

But I turned it off because what if it had rung while I was sitting there? It might have made a difference in my lab results.

If I were really rebellious I'd have left it off and taken the consequences.

I'm working on it. When I pay my bills and the instructions ask that I write on the return slip how much I'm sending them I leave it blank. I don't know if it's being contrary or because I figure whoever is opening the envelope can look on the check and figure it out.

Same with those instructions "please write your check number on the slip." What for? They got a pencil same as I do.

Here lately I've had this nagging desire to be obnoxious just for the heck of it. I leave my shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot where I unloaded bags of groceries into my trunk instead of pushing it over to the designated gathering place at the end of the aisle for carts to wait for their return to the store. Sometimes I'll push it away and if it blocks the adjacent car, so what? I get a certain thrill out of knowing I have inconvenienced some stranger.

I noticed a couple of weeks ago that the store installed some more of those shopping cart pens in the middle of the aisle to accompany the ones at the end. Did I cause them to go to all that trouble and waste a perfectly good parking space so more shoppers would push their carts into the pen? Don't know. But I like to think so. Do I push my cart to those more conveniently-placed pens? Get real! After so many years of being told to be considerate of others, I'm enjoying being a pain in the tush.

One of these days I'm really going to go for big time obnoxious. It's been on my mind for some time to do it, and soon I'm gonna cut loose and be a real pain. After all these years of being deliberately nice and thinking of others, I'm building up to obnoxious-hood, albeit slowly. But I have a plan.

You know those drive-through stations at the bank with the hydraulic tubes? You put your transaction into the plastic container and shoot it over to the banker at the window? One of these days, when I take my deposit slip out of the plastic container and put the container back into its place at the station — ooh, I just tingle at the thought of all this rebellion — I'm gonna hit the green button and send that empty container through the tube, then take off!

I'm walking on the wild side here. What a trip!