"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" is a pithy sports saying that the gaming world embraced wholeheartedly, not knowing just how ruthlessly efficient it can be when deployed tactically by Colombian abuelitas.
Ambulant sellers crowding popular venues, walking along beaches with their colourful calls to the unwary are a predatory reality that can often be endearing and add to the experience of a location.
Mostly, these street market operators are a systemic response to staggering social inequality and difficult economic conditions. They grow wherever there is a service to provide on the go in the presence of those who'll pay them.
It is, mostly, harmless fun. In Cartagena, they are weaponized. It's impossible to cross the street without being offered six tours, two hair braiding services, and one massage on a melting plastic chair.
And they are all so exquisitely polite. They do no relent, and they do not prevaricate, and they always greet prospective prey with a gracious "how are you? How's the day going?". It's old world courtesy on a socio economic battlefield where there are no winners, really.
After coming from Southern Italy and learning how to wrangle or tangle with aggressive, arrogant street peddlers of both goods and guilt, I considered myself vaccinated against this phenomenon. Then I visited gorgeous Colombia.
On the streets of Colombia's premier party town, the pressure never lets up. There is no safe space on the street, no quiet corner on any public beach, even shopkeepers you purchased shorts from will wave at you betrayed if they see you wearing other shorts.
This place of cordial, relentless courtesy and commercial pressure forced me to face myself, and come to the conclusion that I can be a terrible person, and that I don't feel bad about that.
My job is mediation. Between technology and wishes, between business requirements and reality, between programmers and the human race. This is layered on top of a predominantly Catholic early upbringing, which started at the cloister of nuns that prepared us for primary school.
I know guilt, and having to bend between the rock and the hard place, and taking personal responsibility for neither having their precious egos scratched. I understand poverty and the systemic solutions to remediate it. I have empathy for the grandmotherly figures roaming the streets asking for alms.
And then you get hit by half a dozen in quick succession while you're just trying to enjoy dinner. Nothing fancy, a pizza at a table in a beautiful square. A moment of reflection and relaxation to savour the food and the company, to open yourself to that 'relaxation' thing everyone keeps going on about.
Faced with a reality I could not mediate, in a place where I wasn't prepared to face the difficult realities of life, at a time when I just wanted that precious time to myself, I found that I wasn't terribly fond of the abuela who, possibly distraught from impending sunstroke, at an age where she should not have been begging for herself, came around to our table for a second time to re-propose her ask.
I am a terrible person. No, not right. I know precisely what a terrible asshole I was in that moment. Faced with suffering ground out by a relentless machine, I was for a moment unkind in my thoughts.
And I still can't reason that I was completely wrong.