Boomers in Bali
I was recently in Bali on holidays with my family. I rarely see unsupervised boomers there, they’re usually with multi generational family groups.
I had 3 minor boomer experiences in the week we were there.
First one was when I was going through immigration, they have electronic gates now. The sign says hold your passport on the reader. When you do this the gates open, you step forward onto the footprints, the gates close behind you and the camera takes your photo and matches to your passport and opens the gates in front of you. Simple right. Apparently not. The boomer beside me kept tapping her passport on the scanner so the gates wouldn’t open. So she decided hers must be broken and moved to the gate I was at. Despite the red x on my gate as it was in use, she proceeded to repeatedly tap her passport on the scanner. So now the gates wouldn’t open for me. I had to rescan my passport 4 times because she couldn’t follow instructions, despite several people, including my DIL telling her to wait. So what should have taken a minute turned into more.
Second experience, DIL and I need to withdraw money from an ATM. There are 2 side by side in the car park of a hotel. We have to go through a boom gate to access the ATMs. We decide to use one together as this is DILs first overseas trip and is worried about skimming etc. so I do 2 transactions and then DIL starts her transactions. As I’m fueled by a couple of raspberry vodka’s, and I’m on holiday, I start dancing in the booth. As I’m bopping around in the booth I see a boomer glaring at me so I smiled and waved and kept bopping while waiting. Next minute, the security guard comes and opens the door. He says ‘oh there’s two’ and shuts the door and talks to the boomer. People! He called security because he had to wait for us to finish when he could have used the empty ATM directly beside us! Make it make sense.
Third was at the airport. Line up for the ladies loo, cause there’s always a line for the ladies loo. We all line up on the left so people who’ve been can leave and we can go. So I go do my business and try to leave. The line all shuffle back to the left, except boomer. She watches them but doesn’t move. She then watches me walking towards her, doesn’t move. When I stopped in front of her instead of walking through her she’s smiling at me with a confused look, like she’s wondering why I’m stopped to talk to her. Completely clueless. So I told her ‘no it’s fine, don’t move. Just keep blocking the way so people can’t leave’ I still brushed shoulders with her because she wouldn’t move. I just don’t know what’s wrong with them. Is it the lead in the fuel and the paint? Can they really not follow basic instructions and social cues? We still had the best holiday ever.