Meccanized

For the past month or so, I have been uncharacteristically un-peevable, hence the stalling of Meccanized.  Fear not, dear readers, the happy spell has passed. Today, I experienced extreme rudeness that really ground my gears.

I was sitting in my usual seat on the bus home (by the front door) when a middle-aged woman with a cane approached the bus.  Before she even got on the first step (and before anyone sitting had the chance to get up), the woman rudely and angrily looked right at me and yelled “Jesus, you people are so selfish.  Is someone going to get up?”  Now, I am usually the first person to give up my seat (and I very much relish the moral superiority that goes along with that), but today I froze.  My reasons:

- There were 10 other people sitting nearby that could have gotten up.

- I had several bags with me, so standing and holding them all would have been challenging.  The other 10 people nearby had less in hand.

- This woman’s approach was really rude (and that rudeness was for some reason immediately directed at me), and I was partly stunned and partly unwilling to validate that behavior.

Was it worth the Karma points to let her win, stand up and deal with holding my heavy bags and not being able to reach the stability bar (ironically, being the bigger person)?  Would I go to hell if I stayed the course, kept my butt in the seat and waited for someone else to crack under the pressure?

I’m curious to know what you would have done.  I decided that no one has the right to talk to me that way and that someone else could give up their seat.  For about 10 seconds.  Where no one else got up.  At which point my moral strength (or pressure weakness) took over and I yielded my seat to the woman.   She didn’t say thank you and, actually, rolled her eyes at me as I stood there with all my bags.  I fumed silently and mentally composed this blog post to Meccanize her.

Maybe this is what I get for needing to sit near the front of the bus.

Dear Madam,

Let me preface this by saying that I am quite certain that my diminutive stature made you think that I was undeserving of a full seat on the bus just now. However, I assure you — my legs, though smaller than most people’s, are just as tired as anyone else’s (If you prick me, do I not bleed?), and my bag is probably heavier than any other bag on the #3 bus this evening.

I had every right to occupy one full seat on my own. I am a tax-paying (and more importantly, a muni-pass holding) citizen of this great city, and my butt should be welcome in any seat without the possibility of being violated by someone else’s (namely your) butt and grocery bags.

And another thing. There were several other open seats in the front of the bus even closer to the door where you walked in than the one that I had chosen for my own. You opted to walk past those seats and sit, quite literally, on top of my lap. Thus, one can only assume that you got some sort of a power trip from taking over the personal space of a random stranger who was minding her own business, listening to her music and reading her book. That is disturbing on a whole different level. Are you the kind of person who just takes whatever she wants without question or concern? First my seat on the muni, next perhaps a child at the supermarket. It is a slippery slope, ma’am.

And I also do not appreciate the choice words you yelled at me when I asked what you were doing and (maybe not so) politely requested that you sit somewhere else. I am none of those things that you branded me, and I didn’t like the snickers that your unfair typecasting evoked from the rest of the bus-riding population.

I just hope you realize that as soon as you entered by body bubble, I was already mentally writing this blog post.

Crazy lady, you are Meccanized. And, for those of you who are concerned, I did not give up my seat — instead, I held my ground and used my debate skills from my days as a one-woman debate team to keep my seat.