This morning I sat down on one of the priority seats on the tube. Opposite me sat a woman with a ‘baby on board’ badge. On the other side of the pole in the middle of the section I was in, I saw another woman. She also had a ‘Baby on board’ badge and I’m pretty sure she got on at one of the first stops on route from Ealing Broadway into Central London.
In the seats on one side of the isle where the pregnant woman was standing, sat two women. On the other side two men. I kept looking over thinking that perhaps the pregnant lady wanted to stand as surely, otherwise someone would have offered their seat. She must have been around 6 months pregnant and the belly showed and so did her badge.
A few stops and 10 mins later I saw her sighing and closing her eyes as she stood there. She definitely didn’t want to stand. I waved to try to get her attention and asked if she wanted my seat. “That would be lovely” was the response. She had to squeeze past 4 people to get to where I sat and I’m sure that whilst she did that, someone in that middle bit “woke up” and realised that they should have offered their seat. I’ve been there. Sometimes we just don’t notice.
It got me thinking however, about why on earth we are so overly polite that we don’t ask when we’re clearly in a state / situation where we are in our full right to do so? No one would have said no to this lady if she’d asked any of those who sat in the non-priority seats in the middle.
There’s something about us not wanting to “trouble” someone else and instead, at times, we suffer through when we really shouldn’t have. Funny really when you think about it as most people if they realised they were actually causing some trouble or inconvenience, e.g. in the case of the pregnant woman this morning, would most likely answer “Yes, of course”. Or so I’d like to believe anyway.
Image via flickr user Felizberto
