Crying over spilled milk (and other beverages)

Last night I took my second shot at the $40 Wednesday night HORSE tournament at Green Valley Ranch.

I was the first one to take my seat. Then a woman sat down on my right. She had a beer in a large glass. She tried to set it in the table's built-in cupholder, but it was too big. It just sat precariously on the rim of the cupholder, in what was quite obviously an even less stable position than if it were flat on the table. As soon as she let go of it, apparently satisfied with her solution to the problem, I thought, "That's gonna spill, and it's gonna get on me." I almost said something to her about it, then suppressed it, thinking that I was going to have to be six inches away from her for a long time, and that wasn't a very friendly way to start things off. I hate being confrontational.

No more than 60 seconds later, she stood to take off her coat, and, sure enough, she managed to plop the whole thing into her lap. It was less disastrous for me than I had imagined, fortunately. I just got some splashed on my leg and on the chair. But still I had to take a few trips to the desk for tissues to sop it up. My friend Eric arrived just then, planning to enter the same tournament. I'm afraid I wasn't very good company, being plenty peeved at the moron who was sitting next to me and distracted by the task of trying to clean up just as they were getting ready to deal the first hand.

I mean, is this woman really so stupid as to not be able to anticipate what was going to happen with a full glass of beer perched in a manifestly unstable situation? Even if she has personally never spilled a drink at a poker table before, surely she has seen others do it. One of the benefits of a large cerebral cortex is supposed to be that in addition to learning from our own experiences, we can learn things to either do or avoid doing by observing the experiences of others. This is why we do things like buckle seat belts, even if we ourselves have never been seriously injured in a car crash. Maybe the woman I saw last night has had a lobotomy and has thus lost this capability, which evolution spent a few million years developing for us.

Look, I love it when my opponents drink. If you want to handicap yourself by voluntarily ingesting a chemical that will impair your vision, judgment, memory, and analytical ability, and then play poker with me, be my guest. I even grudgingly accept that drunk players occasionally toppling over their drinks in a stupor is a practically inevitable consequence of their excessive imbibing.

But this woman was, as far as I could tell, completely sober, having just received her first beer of the night. She can't write this off to alcohol-induced lack of coordination. No, it was just simple stupidity, an inability to foresee even the most obvious of short-term future consequences.

It's not that she's unique. Nearly every day I shake my head at the foolish obliviousness to blindingly obvious danger that some people exhibit--driving with a toddler in one's lap, sitting on the edge of the bed of a pickup truck going down the highway, riding a motorcycle without a helmet, composing text messages while driving, etc.

Oh, and while I'm ranting here, how about a dope slap for the casino executives who decided to have drinks served in glasses larger than the cupholders they have in their tables (or, to look at it the other way, who order poker tables with cupholders smaller than the glasses in which they serve drinks)? [Knocking on their heads like Biff in "Back to the Future"] Hello? Is anybody in there?

The annoyance of the whole mess is directly proportionate to how patently foreseeable and avoidable it was.

Grrrrrrrrr.