Invisibility

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My daughter blames me for the lines at the side of her mouth - I told her always to have a slight smile in repose and she says it caused her laughter lines. You can't win, can you?

My nephews labelled it my sister's Erna Gruhn look - she was married to one of Hitler's generals.

greatnan I surmise it's the same one my children call my SMO look!

One of those laws of nature, there you are walking around in a place you are completely unfamiliar with, and someone else will stop to ask you the way. Maybe everyone else is dashing along looking more purposeful?

I normally have a pleasant expression and I smile a lot - this can be a nuisance as people often approached me for directions which was not always convenient. However, I have a certain look which can turn wrong-doers to stone (they teach it you when you train as a tax inspector!) I think it is quite right to force a check-out operator to look at you when handing you your change. I get mildly annoyed when the women on adjacent tills are holding an animated conversation whilst checking items. I always check my till receipt as I am sure they could easily make mistake.

...I hope it has the sense not to come here ....

crimson are you perhaps my next door neighbour?

When she goes off on one of her trips I have to look after her house plants and pets. I spend ages trying to rescussitate dying plants, curing her goldfish of white spot or fungal infections or searching for her b****y tortoise.

This year she forgot to box the b****y thing up before the frost came and conscripted me in to joining her in a house to house search of neighbours' gardens, climbing over wall if they were out. I still have the bruises. We never did find the blasted thing. If its got any sense it's found a new home

Jess; it depends whether I have make up on or am in bag lady mode [my boss told me I looked like a bag lady the other day; no face,woolly hat, trainers and long grey coat]. I couldn't disagree with her!

Jodi; it is an ex goldfish. Can I also advise everyone not to come back as either a goldfish or a houseplant belonging to me as the chances of survival are very slim . gkal; I once spent ages in a supermarket helping a lady with her shopping [think she'd forgotten her glasses or something] only for her to wrongly accuse me at the checkout of either queue jumping [I hadn't]or being at the basket checkout with too many items [I wasn't]. I was gobsmacked. Felt like grabbing her basket and putting all the stuff back on the shelves .

Elderly crimson are you talking about yourself? 20 years in the future or something?

Feeling "invisible" can be useful as I don't want to be noticed for the wrong reasons. I could rant on about white hair pros/cons for hours (but won't!) but I think facial expression and a narrow attitude can be much more ageing than white hair. I do give people who push in in queues the benefit of the doubt but try to look a little "taken aback". Occasionally I have been accused of pushing in in front of others in a supermarket queue which has shocked me as I'm just not a "pushing in" sort of person. The thing that makes me feel bad is when someone at the checkout hands me my change but looks elsewhere - makes me feel like an object. Yet it probably says more about the other person probably lacking confidence. Must admit that I have been known not to take my change and when they are forced to look at me, I then take it! Nasty aren't I?

Sorry about your goldfish. Is it ok now?

crimson I'm still waiting for my Geek of the Week Award from last week, forget which thread it was???

I think elegran made off with it

Jess/Jodi..thinking of the bus journey to Walsall where I poured out my worries about my sick goldfish to the lady sat next to me . Don't ever sit next to me on a bus/train and, if you see an elderly lady with a whippet walking towards you leggit in the opposite direction. As for yesterday, Jodi you deserve the gransnet medal of the highest honour .

You hit the nail on the head, Greatnan. It's an insurance issue. If a doctor makes a wrong diagnosis and gives the wrong treatment in an emergency - on a flight, for example - he/she can be sued.

Is it possible that medical professionals are afraid of being sued if they do something and it turns out to be the wrong thing?
Did anybody else see the horrible story of the man who was pushed onto the track of the New York subway and nobody tried to help him out. One man took photos which he sold - he said he had been using his camera to signal to the driver.

I obviously got talking to the medical student after that and she said she'd been just about to do something before I stepped in. The doctor vanished back behind his newspaper again probably to avoid the black looks I kept sending him

I am astounded that a doctor and medical student didn't help. I might have been tempted to ask them what was it that held them back from helping a man in distress. Well done Jodi, he could have died while these useless people looked the other way.

Well done jodi - there is lots of research to say people are more likely to help someone in distress if they are the only person present than in a crowd.
The only hospital consultant I know says his first impulse is to keep his head down if someone says "is there a doctor..."
But on a plane back from the med (with his daughter, also a doctor) they did fess up, diagnosed a probable heart attack and told the captain he had to head for the nearest airport.

Jodi - Good for you. What a good thing you didn't take the easy option of not getting involved, and I'm sure the man you helped is thinking exactly the same thing right now.

But gracesmum how can you NOT get involved when someone is in trouble? It goes against everything I've been taught and how I've been brought up (incidentally in an aitheist family) ?

It's that British thing of Not Getting Involved, isn't it? Well done, you.

PS meant to add, this poor man was 'invisible' too.

Glad it's not just me that attract these sad people then JessM.

i had a relatively easy train journey north until York, then a strange incident. There were four people sitting at the table on my left across the passage and I was sharing my seat with a young girl student. Suddenly the man directly opposite me started to have some kind of mild fit. He started to shake, went a funny red colour, sweating and was, I thought, trying to talk but couldn't. I thought he was having a heart attack. I looked at the others (three middle aged men) on his table and they were pointedly ignoring him. So I stood up and asked him if he was ok. He couldn't answer. I asked if I could loosen his collar as he seemed to be bulging at the neck too. He just about managed to nod, so I took his tie off and undid his top button. Then he sorted of passed out. All this time no one else was helping or doing anything. So I asked the other men on his table to watch him as I was going for help. I got to the buffet car and they reacted very quickly and sent an attendant back with me. By the time I got back with him the others at the table had opened his brief case and found something to indicate he was diabetic. They were trying to get some glucose tablets into him. It turned out he was hypoglycaemic. It also transpired that the man opposite him was a doctor and the girl sitting next to me was a medical student. Why hadn't they reacted to his obvious distress? The attendant stayed with him until the train made an unscheduled at the next station and he was loaded into a sort of wheelchair thingy and taken away to hospital.