Items

• 2021-11

  Strangers united in pettiness

  Medical mask mandates on public transport had been in effect for a while now when this happened: There are always the inevitable idiots who refuse to wear their masks (or just wear them below their nose, which in addition to being stupid also looks stupid) and usually people will just roll their eyes but say nothing - that one morning went differently. The train was neither particularly crowded nor empty, for each 4-seater there'd be 2-3 seats occupied. We rolled into a station, people got on, among them a young woman who sat down on the first available seat. Directly behind her, some middle-aged guy, in possession of a mask but having it bunched up beneath his chin like a face-diaper. Upon seeing the woman sit down, he suddenly started ranting at her because apparently he'd wanted to sit in that seat (note that there were plenty of seats left), insulting her with a barrage of sexist and racist terms I don't care to repeat. She ignored him. Another passenger, however, didn't, and told the mask-less idiot to stop making an ass of himself and put on his mask before speaking and 'spreading his aerosols' indoors, which drew the idiot's ire on him. After realising that neither the woman nor the other passengers would offer their seat to him in response to his insults, the idiot moved on to the next 4-seater - only to find that the people there used their bags and jackets to occupy the empty seats there to prevent him from sitting down there, responding to his cussing by telling him to just put on his fucking mask again. He moved on, everyone on the next row of seats blocked him as well, again and again. One woman, lacking a bag, went as far as full-on man-spreading in the middle of two seats to occupy them both. In the end, the idiot had to move to a whole other train car to find a seat. The rest of us was left with smug smiles and a sense of petty satisfaction for the rest of the ride!