At gym recently, I accidentally stepped on to a moving treadmill and took a huge fall. I grazed my hands, my knees and my shoulder. I have no recollection of how it happened because I fell so quickly (I hope there’s no YouTube video out there). The sad thing is that when it happened, no one came to help me. In fact, people even walked past as though I was invisible. Have we really become so detached from one another that we can’t be bothered to help one another? Are people so concerned about minding their own business that they choose to ignore someone who may need help? Odd.

I was driving to work the other day and the newspaper seller was opening a sucker. As he popped it into his mouth, he threw the wrapper on the floor. I stopped, opened my window and asked him to pick it up. He laughed in my face and walked away. It put me in such a bad mood all day long. Do people not care?

People you see at the office every single day who pack up their bags at the end of the day and walk out without saying goodbye. I was in the lifts and started chatting to a colleague recently. When the lift doors opened, she miraculously got super-charged legs and walked off at high speed without me. Huh? Was it something I said? Have basic manners gone out the window? Are we becoming socially awkward around one another?

A good friend of mine was in a coma in hospital a few weeks back. As he recovered, I asked him if mutual friends of ours knew what happened, he answered, “It’s awkward. How do I tell them? Do I just put it on Facebook? I don’t really know how to bring it up.” Sometimes we announce the most ‘arb’ details on social media, such as what we ate for dinner or what time we go to bed. But alerting people of something more serious just seems out of place. How did we do it in the old days?

And don’t get me started on emails. Does anyone bother to reply to emails anymore? It feels as if I send emails into a dark abyss and no one ever acknowledges what I say or send them. I only realized the email system was down after a whole week last week after supplier emails were not coming through. I had concluded that they were incompetent and they thought that I was ignoring them. No, the emails just weren’t coming through but no one picked up a phone to check.

Some days all I do is shake my head and wonder… what the hell has gone wrong? Is this the new norm?