Do you remember that wonderful device from the Ghostbusters movie - a ghost detector that easily detected almost any paranormal activity in the neighborhood? I’m almost sure that if someone bothered to invent the same detector, only reacting to entitled people around us, the device would break down from overload almost immediately after being turned on.
Entitled people surround us literally everywhere, you can meet them anywhere: on the street, in a store or on public transport. But what is most incredible is the predisposition of some people to being latently entitled. That is, this unpleasant quality manifests itself in random people at the most inopportune moment. As this, for example, happened with the user u/paperkitten75, whose story we're about to tell you.
The author of the post lives with her husband in a little town in Sweden and one day they decided to take a trip to the capital city
Image credits: sbamueller (not the actual photo)
The spouses booked first-class seats on the speed train to get to their destination with maximum comfort
Image credits: paperkitten75
However after entering the car, the spouses found some random elderly lady already sitting in one of their seats
Image credits: Daniel Frese (not the actual photo)
Image credits: paperkitten75
The lady firstly suggested the couple sat somewhere else but then gave in and moved to another seat - apparently someone else's too
It all happened a few years ago when the Original Poster (OP) and her husband, a couple in their mid-40s, decided to travel to Stockholm from the small Swedish town where they lived. The couple booked tickets for the first class of the high-speed train. Yes, it’s a tad bit more expensive, the author admits, but on the other hand, they don’t travel to the capital that often.
Just agree that such a trip simply could not go smoothly - because otherwise we would not be telling this tale. And rightly so, having entered their car, the couple found in one of their pre-booked and paid seats some elderly lady who had already laid out all her stuff around her and clearly considered this seat her personal hill to die on.
What followed was a tense dialogue between the OP’s husband and the elderly lady whom the author of the post calls Karen (and who are we to disagree with the author?) Karen said that she was already comfortable in this seat, so she didn’t want to move, but the OP and her husband, in her opinion, could easily occupy one of the empty seats.
To this the man reasonably objected that at the next stop, when more passengers entered the car, they would likely have tickets for just one of these seats. In other words, he made it clear to the entitled lady that she would still have to move somewhere. Which is what she did.
Muttering something under her breath, the passenger grabbed her stuff and moved to one of the empty seats next to her. The train started moving - and guess what happened at the next stop? That's right - it turned out that this lady again wrongly took someone else's place, and the skirmish from the previous paragraph was repeated. With the same outcome.
The most interesting thing, as the original poster notes, is that all the seats in the car were reserved - that is, this weird lady still had her own seat. She just, for some reason known only to her, didn’t want to sit there. However, we can only guess about her possible motives...
Image credits: Michael Coghlan (not the actual photo)
“Inability and unwillingness. These two words contain one of the fundamental properties of people being entitled - the inability to realize the consequences and the unwillingness to take into account the opinions of others,” says Irina Matveeva, a psychologist and certified NLP specialist from Odessa, Ukraine, whom Bored Panda asked for a comment on this case. “In other words, a person is only interested in their own desires and whims, which they place above everything else. And the inconvenience of others, compared with the inconvenience that may be caused to their precious person, in such cases seems like a mere trifle.”
“And this also results in the inability to make the simplest logical conclusions against the backdrop of obvious decisions that are literally in plain sight. In this particular situation taken, there is a refusal to even assume that many empty seats around may also have their owners. Little kids usually operate in such categories, but this goes away with age. Unfortunately, not for everyone," Irina says ironically.
By the way, the original poster in the comments says that this entitled lady later took her booked seat at the very end of the car. Apparently, she just didn’t like it - or she wanted to sit next to some of her friends, the OP presumes. In any case, this in no way justifies such behavior, the desire to sit anywhere but in your own seat. "There must be a name for this kind of behavior," someone wrote in the comments.
And now we are literally returning to the beginning of our story, where we talk about the entitled people detector. Judging by the comments to the original post - and people shared many similar stories - the level of entitledness around us is truly off the charts. And something needs to be done about this.
One of the commentators gives witty advice: “I always tell these people I had a dream last night that if I didn’t travel in that seat, there would be a train/plane crash and many people would die. Works every time.” By the way, how do you usually cope in similar situations?
People in the comments cracked up at this lady and shared lots of similar stories based on their life cases as well
