Courtesy
Being one of the lucky few who lived in the East Bay and worked in San Francisco, I was occasionally forced to take BART to and from work. When you’re put into such close proximity to so many other people, you get to learn about courtesy and the consequences of not showing it.
One day, I was going through the eternal struggle of finding a seat on BART during the afternoon commute. I’m waiting patiently in line, when this woman barges up in front of me just as the train’s doors open. Due to this pushiness, she gets the last seat on the train.
Now, I’ve always considered myself a gentleman, and had I reached the seat first I would’ve have assumed she was a lady and given up the seat to her. Of course, now that I had evidence to the contrary, I was a little rankled.
I’ve always heard about “karma” this and “circle of life” that. In California, there’s more of that talk than you can shake a stick at. Believe me, I’ve tried my share of stick-shaking. Then again, that might be bad karma itself to shake a stick at karma and the circle of life. I digress.
So the woman grabs the last seat, which is next to a lady and her two year old son. I smiled to myself, not because the child was overly cute or because it was so warm and touching to see a little family travelling on our beloved BART system. I smiled because I realized that the woman and I have both tuned in to the conversation in progress between mother and offspring.
The boy and his mother were having quite a cerebral discussion about the intricacies of the phrase “hold it ’til we reach our stop.”
His mother was bringing forth the fact that this was not the proper forum for the discourse the young lad wished to unleash upon us. She further expounded that the original theorem held true, and in fact, “it” could be held indefinitely if she so desired.
The young man, on the other hand, was of the opinion that her theories were based not only on fallacies of the highest order, but also on a heretofore untested statement of his capacity for withholding such a discourse.
I was rather amused by this little debate, and I could see that my little seat-swiper was rather horrified. The mother occasionally shot disapproving looks at me, but whether it was in response to my soft chuckling or to the “drip drip drip” noises I made every now and then, we may never know.
Just for the record, the boy won the argument.
Rudeness 0, Dry Cleaners 1
