“Don’t look in my direction again, mate.”

Pool was cancelled for this weekend, so I made an on-the-spot decision to play pool tonight to ensure that the weekly quota is met. Fortunately, other people came along (even on such short notice) so that I wouldn’t have to play against myself. We were playing pool at Rosemount Pot Black (North Perth) when some guy from another table walked up to me, got right in my face, jabbed a finger towards me and said:

Don’t look in my direction again, mate.

He then walked back to his table. I and the friend that I was talking to looked at each other with puzzled expressions on our faces. It was just… odd. I hadn’t even noticed the guy before. When I told my other mate, he got pretty upset and made a point of facing the guy, arms crossed and with a firm stare. When he got the next round of drinks he told the woman at the counter that there might be trouble.

After a while, the guy walked back over to the table while I was away and apologised to my two mates. I was on the phone at the time and went back to the table to see what was going on. I initially didn’t know he was apologising and was concerned that he was harrassing my friends. Then he said something like:

Sorry about earlier… I’ve got a lot of stress.

and motioned to shake my hand (which I accepted). I wonder what prompted his about face. I wouldn’t completely rule out a change of heart, but I wonder if it was due to the stare-down, his mates having more sense than him, or him seeing us on the phone a lot (maybe assuming we were calling some of our mates).

7 thoughts on ““Don’t look in my direction again, mate.””

  1. Hm, seems it was a good idea to skip on pool that night. Given the amount of stress I’m under with work and dealing with people at JAFWA for various issues* I’d have probably gotten the nickname of Vlad the pool cue Impaler. Preferably of a vertical nature ala Hellsing.

    * There’s dumb people out there all the time. Just this Saturday at JAFWA, I had to tell someone off that setting fire to your ticket and burning your hand putting it out is not a very intelligent thing to do. I can’t believe I have to even say that sort of stuff…

  2. I should have, except I figured burning your own hand was punishment enough. The problem is JAFWA (and other groups where public is admitted) attracts a fair number of well, unsavoury public elements. We’re dealing with a rather nasty, protracted battle with some of these now. In future, we’ll probably be rewriting our Constitution and Code of Conduct to eliminate the hassles we’ve had so far.

    It’s sad that any public group has to do this, but it’s in their best interest. Another group that does manga/doujinshi called PenCafé is looking into is as they have people showing up mostly to play games, talk and ogle at the girls rather than drawing. A Code of Conduct and/or Constitution would give the members power to control who attends and how.

    It’s a shame these actions are required but it has been proven beyond a doubt that idiots exist out there who flaunt the law any way they can to abuse normal going people who really aren’t to blame and didn’t do anything wrong in the first place. This sort of psychological, emotional and verbal abuse will not be tolerated in the future. Hopefully this will be the last time it happens, but I’m not holding my breath…

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