On arena etiquette

Was over at BR's lately, reading about 'Arena Etiquette', and it took me back to a couple of situations where one was painful, and both could have had the potential to be dangerous.

The first occured when I was at a cutting with my then boyfriend Bruce. Bruce had a cutting horse stud that never was going to amount to much of anything either as a sire or a cutting horse but neither I, nor the trainer, could tell him that, he wouldn't listen (he was what we in the horse business call a little 'barn blind').  For some reason that I can't recall we had taken both the stud and a mare even though she wasn't entered.  Maybe because you could point her at a trailer across the yard and she'd go and bail in; him? not so much but if she was in there he couldn't get in there fast enough.  Anyway, Bruce's trainer was going to show the horse and Bruce had to go home (he was a die-hard union man and was waiting for a call to go to work) so I was elected to warm up the horse and keep an eye on Rotten-Ronda (loving nickname, she was a real doll and her registered name was Doc's Rondo Leo, so Rotten-Ronda it was).  We had been loping around the warm-up ring for a bit when a woman who should have kown better rode over to the arena fence to visit with someone who had just arrived to watch parking her horse perpendicular to the fence.  I navigated around her the first time and had decided that the next time 'round I'd ask her to park parallel instead so that others could get around her safely when she put it in reverse and backed right into my knee, catching my kneecap under her horse's tail.  You wanna talk about a puke or pass out moment.  I had to ride over to the fence, get off and put my head between my knees for a few minutes.  I had done some damage to my knee several years earlier while curling in high school (yes, we had to learn about it, and football, and baseball, and soccer, the list goes on) so it was a little weakened already and I really didn't need this on top of it.  So here I was, two horses in tow and having to get them loaded and home by myself when the event was finished.  Nice.  The worst part was that the wench never even apologised and when I finally made it home Bruce had the audacity to yell at me for being late.  What a jerk.

The next instance was when I was at the Parelli clinic that I posted about before.  There was a guy there who was obviously a newbie that had a horse that someone sold him as gentle.  Ol' horse was a retired outriding horse from the chuckwagon races so he had basically one speed, fast.  That part never came to light until the afternoon because we had spent all morning on the ground doing ground work.  Well we saddled up in the afternoon after lunch and the games began.  We were going around the arena at a walk and my little horse was a little slower than him and instead of going to the inside and passing, he just stayed on my tailpipe and annoyed Indiana to no end.  I cut across the arena to get away from him on more than one occassion, but he didn't seem to get the hint.  Move up to a trot and now Indy is starting to get royally pissed so we cut across the arena again and about halfway across, she bogged her head and tried to drop me right there to which the instructor called ot, "Next time she's going to do that, let me know and I'll judge it!"  Cheek.
The whole point I guess, is that there are some people out there who haven't got any courtesy or common sense.