“What are you doing here?”

This is a small thing, but it bugs me. It seems to be new, and the buggishness factor grows each time I hear it.

In TV shows, when Character A is surprised at encountering Character B doing something unexpected, A will say, “What are you doing here?”

So far, so good.

Much more commonly, the situation is that A unexpectedly encounters B in a place where B should not be. A should say, “What are you doing here?” Instead, A always says “What are you doing here?” Same emphasis as in the first situation, but completely inappropriate in the second.

It’s as if TV actors and/or directors only know one way to say that sentence, no matter what the situation is in the story. If only they’d spend some time thinking about such details instead of mindlessly churning out product, the world would be a slightly brighter place. And I’d be somewhat less bugged.

Yeah, I know. The economy is struggling to avoid a double dip, a band of Republican wackadoodles is slavering to be president and so dense is the American voter that Obama is not crushing them all in the polls by a margin of 99 to 1, the Middle East (that’s what I’ll always call it!) is bubbling even more than it usually does, climate change is upon us and accelerating even while those same wackadoodles deny its existence, etc., and I’m complaining about television actors placing the stress on the wrong word.

But that’s an argument against all blog posts that aren’t dreadfully serious and deep and penetrating and that don’t contribute to solving the world’s problems. Fret not. My next post is going to be long, dull, terribly serious, and it will radically change human society. I should be working on it now. I shouldn’t be here. What am I doing here?