Polite people
A gobsmacked Jane Bradley can’t believe it after a cafe newspaper is swiped from under her nose
The other morning, I took half an hour out to sit down and enjoy a flat white, flicking through a newspaper kindly provided by the cafe.
After a few minutes, a woman, smartly dressed and middle-aged, walked up to my table, where I was sitting alone, and proceeded to tug the paper out from under my nose.
I was so stunned, I didn’t know what to do. When I eventually managed to splutter that I was actually still reading it and would she mind awfully putting it back, she told me that as I had looked away from the paper (open, in front of me at a feature I was enjoying with my coffee cup weighing down a corner) to reply to a message on my phone, I clearly wasn’t reading it and therefore, she was going to take it. No amount of protestations – including offers of other papers lying unused on adjoining, empty tables, prevented her from rudely snatching my reading material away and stalking off with it to her seat. I was gobsmacked.
Nicer-natured, more forgiving friends have pointed out that she may have been having a particularly bad day, or she could perhaps be on the autistic spectrum and not realise the impact of her behaviour. For various reasons, I don’t think the latter is true. She may well have been having a bad day, but whether or not that was the case, I believe she was just a rude, entitled woman who caught me off guard and got what she wanted without question.
I spent the next ten minutes regretting my cowardly behaviour, crossly thinking of retorts I could have made, how I could have prevented her from swiping my reading material – whereas I had just rolled over and let her win.
Instead, I downed my drink and passive-aggressively muttered to her on my way out that she wasn’t actively drinking her coffee at that particular moment, so therefore