This late afternoon, I wandered around the Upper East Side at potential new buildings where we could be moving to this summer. Chris is set on our moving, and he wants it to be a building with a doorman and multiple amenities. One of the things he is looking for are floor-to-ceiling windows (yep, we want that life), and so I spent a lot of time looking up at the tall buildings to see what their windows looked like.

Something I didn’t expect to encounter when looking at buildings and speaking with doormen was the horribly rude and inhuman treatment of some of the doormen by the entitled and overly privileged residents. At the front of one building, I witnessed a woman, just back from shopping at Whole Foods, with multiple paper grocery bags in her hands. When she reached the doorman standing at the door, this woman immediately shoved the grocery bags into the man’s stomach and asked, “So, did you see my kids? Did you tell them what I asked you to tell them?” And as she’s speaking, she’s already walking away from him into the building. Is that the treatment this particular doorman is used to? He seemed completely unfazed, as though this was normal behavior on this rude woman’s part, and responded as though everything were “normal.” This is all “normal” to them? He’s just the one who serves who can be treated like garbage and as though he’s not even human, and she’s the entitled rich witch who’s probably treated those in the service industry like this all her life and doesn’t realize she’s not even treating this man like a human being (nor does she probably care)?

It was so shocking. I never even knew people lived in buildings with doormen until I moved to New York. To see the over-privileged and their lack of regard for other people of other social status is so sickening to me.