This isn’t a complaint, more of a symptom of the suburbs, but I find myself not wanting to eat out at lunch at work if I have to drive.  Depending on where you’re going and how crowded the streets are where you work, you can easily spend 30 minutes in your car just going back and forth to where you want to eat.  While I tend to bring a lunch on most days, it’s nice to have the option of a short break from inhaling recycled office air, especially near the end of a week.  In larger offices, there usually is a cafeteria and while cafeteria choices have definitely improved in the past decade, you usually don’t have a lot of options to choose from.

In the jobs I’ve had in Atlanta and Chicago that were downtown, it was very convenient to have a choice of a handful of quick lunch places to eat within a 5 minute walk.  While the cafeteria in our building is substandard compared to the last place I worked at (although the new job is MUCH better), we’re fortunate that we are across the street from a mini-mall that has several eateries and a grocery store.  The only drawback to that is that we have to cross 8 lanes of traffic to get there!  As anyone who lives or works in the suburbs knows, pedestrians aren’t on most drivers’ “pay attention to” list, so crossing an 8-lane concrete River of Death can be harrowing sometimes.

It’s times like this when I have to suppress my city boy urges to be an aggressive walker.  No one in the suburbs cares that you have the right of way.  Now, it’s not like you can’t get run over in the city but since there is a higher volume of pedestrians, people tend to notice them a bit more.  Of course, cabbies have never paid attention to drivers or pedestrian rights.  Someone I know had her foot run over by a cabbie in San Francisco.  On more than one occasion while living in Chicago I have pounded on a cabbie’s windows when they almost sideswipe me.  I would get the obligatory honk as they blow by, accompanied by whatever is “the finger” from their country of origin.  To be honest, I got very lucky as a pedestrian in Chicago since I would walk in front of cars because I had the right of way.  How my friends and I never got nicked once is beyond me. 

As city snobs (anyone with a 312 or 773 area code), whenever a car wouldn't let us walk, we'd mutter something about "those fucking '708'ers".  Yes, by then there was also 847 and 630 area code by then, but '630'ers or '847'ers doesn't roll off the tongue as easily.  The '815'ers weren't even on our radar as objects of scorn, as you might as well have lived in Wisconsin back then.