Hiking back and forth between my hotel and the convention center in San Diego, I had to deal with…well, I'm not sure what you'd call them. They were folks assigned to direct traffic (car and foot) but they weren't police officers by any means. They reminded me of hall monitors back in elementary school: Fellow students who, having been designated to patrol the halls or prevent littering, suddenly turned into a cross between Judge Dredd and Barney Fife. It's like a little power goes to some heads and there isn't a lot else happening up there, so they bark orders and yell at people, and there are times when it seems like something more is going on than an honest attempt to do one's job. Some sort of desperate, deep-seated need to boss others around is bubbling to the surface.
Not all the "officials" around the convention center fell into that classification, and I observed one being enormously helpful to a bewildered family that couldn't fathom how on Earth to get back to their hotel. But I also encountered at least two of the Dredd/Fife variety, both of whom seemed not only unnecessarily rude but also largely incompetent. By that, I mean they were so busy trying to sound authoritative that they couldn't pay sufficient attention to where the cars were, where they were trying to go, what the traffic lights were indicating, etc. They were telling people to walk at the wrong time and then scolding them when they did or didn't. I don't know what it is about having A Little Power other than that some people, I guess, often feel like they have none…so when they do, they go a little berserk with it.
On the way back from San Diego, we made a wrong turn and wound up at a checkpoint on the way to Camp Pendleton. There was a young Marine on duty there who, at first, seemed to be waving at us to ignore a stop sign and drive past him. Then, once we did, he yelled at us to stop and started hollering at us the way you'd lecture a nine-year-old: "Didn't you see that sign? What do you think that sign means?" The immediate goal did not seem to be to protect the security of Camp Pendleton or even to help some errant motorists find their way back to the freeway. He seemed to just care about us acknowledging that he had the right to yell at us and to make us apologize to him. We did, he pointed out the route back to the proper road, and we were off. I'm all for following rules and obeying signs but this wasn't about that…and I couldn't help but feel that he waved for us to ignore that stop sign just so he could yell at us for ignoring that stop sign.