Riddle me this

This is a mini-rant.

Riddle me this: How come when people are trying to reacquire stray ping pong balls and the ball goes to the next table, so many of them will aggressively go after it even if the players at the other table are in the middle of a point (which means they should bloody wait until the point is done!) even at the expense of their own health? I have seen this everywhere I've played ping pong and because the quarters we have at Oxford are close ones, I see it more often than usual here. It's also a great way to get seriously hurt --- I've seen multiple people get smacked in the head by a paddle because they did this, although nothing truly serious happened to them as a result of that. The most extreme case I saw today was that I was about to return a ball with a very hard top spin and I suddenly noticed out of the corner of my eye (or out of half of my eye) that somebody's face was suddenly between my paddle and the ball (and I was about to hit the ball really hard and was swinging accordingly). I had to stop short to make sure I didn't nail the guy in the side of the face and I twisted my knee slightly in the process of cutting short my stroke (basically, it's all people involved that can get hurt when people go too close to another table with a point in progress). It still hurts a bit but it should be ok (but part of my mind is telling me I should have just finished my stroke and not risked hurting myself because it was the other idiot who couldn't even wait 20 seconds for the point to finish). Be patient, people!

George Carlin had it right:People are fucking stupid!

(At least this post reminded me to add the 'ping pong injuries' label. That became a meme among the ping pong gang at Caltech the last couple of years.)