>To the ouchy painy oh-my-poor-back guy career-panning at the corner of Bayer’s road and Connaught. Give up that bullshit holding your back thing as you walk, will you? No one with career-ending back pain that bad would be able to make it to the toilet, let alone cover the 30 Km you do every day up and down the median, and in case you haven’t noticed, you don’t even do it when the light goes green and you trot back to your starting point. You want my pity? Cut off your ears – then maybe I’ll believe you’ve got a real excuse for being too good to work the shitty headset-job circuit like everyone else.
This article appears in Feb 14-20, 2008.
He and all the other panhandlers wouldn’t be out there if there weren’t good (tax free) money in it for them.
My grandparents live near that intersection. They told me that he parks his not too shabby car behind the gas station all day while he’s out there panhandling. Go figure!
Why doesn’t the city make panhandling illegal? Or, at the very least, allow stores to collect donations so that the funds people do give aren’t misused?
Panhandlers can be annoying, but making it illegal could be getting a bit too ‘Big Brother’ for most people’s comfort. I know I dont speak for everybody here, but I wouldnt want to live in such a restricted society. Then again, maybe there could be a rule prohibiting panhandlers from operating within a certain proximity to the entrance of a business; similar to the restrictions on public smoking. Not that it would necessarily work, but I think there’s alot worse to deal regarding city life than panhandlers anyway.