My friend has a saying for when the world feels particularly dark: “Most people are good.” I used to take comfort from that reminder. Unfortunately it’s not working so well for me any more, because it seems increasingly unlikely to be true.
This week, there was further confirmation in the rise of a new trend: seat snatching, the latest evidence that people across the board are getting meaner. The milk of human kindness appears to have curdled.
Well-documented on social media, seat snatching is when someone sits in the reserved train seat you have pre-booked, and refuses to move. Sometimes this will be subtle; they’ll pretend to be asleep, have headphones on, be glued to a book. At other times it’s blatant – they will look you in the eye and flatly announce they’re staying put.
“We buy RESERVED seats on a train to get to your seat and someone’s sat in it and telling you it’s a free for all so not moving and no one does anything about it, my seat says RESERVED on it and it’s on my train ticket,” one passenger ranted on TikTok. And that’s just for those who are brave/foolish enough to challenge a seat snatcher. “Currently standing on my two-hour train because someone sat in my seat and I’m afraid of confrontation,” reported another person.
Some train companies have policies in place to address this awful phenomenon. LNER’s Seat Guarantee Scheme promises passengers compensation if the seat they’ve booked isn’t available and staff can’t find another. Great Western Railway recommends you “contact a member of staff who would then be able to speak to the other customer and ask them to move”, while noting that they can’t force this to happen. National Rail also suggests, “Find the onboard train manager and they will be able to help you.” But again, if the seat snatcher says nope, what are they going to do?
Getting your money back isn’t even the point – well, not entirely. It’s the principle. For some, the idea that you would do The Wrong Thing, and then – instead of falling over yourself to apologise and make it right – double down, is unthinkable. What’s worrying is that it feels like the kind of human being who would act like this is fast becoming the majority.
Most of us witness selfish, bad behaviour every day online, and have become shockingly numb to it. On social media sites, all nuance is dead, and users are certainly not backwards at coming forwards in disagreeing in the most aggressive language possible, seemingly with no thought for the other party’s feelings.
I had a personal, mind-blowing experience of this looking-out-for-number-one mindset, when my mum – who has mobility issues, so has been given a Blue Badge – was trying to park. There was one disabled bay, and somebody was already in it, with his engine running. We tried to get his attention to mime-ask whether he was about to go, but he was lost in his phone. There were no other spaces nearby, my mum simply wouldn’t have been able to walk that far, so she pulled over and I ran to his car. The window was down, so I politely asked if he was leaving. He said he wasn’t.
The rule is that you must display your Blue Badge on the dashboard, and he hadn’t, so I said, “Oh, you know this is a disabled space?”
“Yeah,” he mumbled. I asked if he had a Blue Badge.
“No. Do you?” he barked.
“My mum does, and she’s driving. We’d like to use this space please,” I said.
“I’m waiting,” he replied.
Baffled, I reiterated that my mum had the permit needed to park here, please could we use the space, and he repeated his line, that he was waiting. It took me longer than it should have for the penny to drop, to snap back to reality. He understood perfectly. He just didn’t care. Foolishly, I gave it one last go, recapping the situation – he was unlawfully parked in a disabled space that a disabled person needed to use, please.
“Get a life,” he spat.
I was genuinely stunned. He wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed. He couldn’t care less. I took a photo on my phone of his car parked in the space, because my inner Karen thought maybe I could report him later and, hilariously, that anyone would care, which it later transpired they would not. When I spoke to my local council about it, they said there was no point emailing in the picture because there was no traffic wardens around that day.
He was furious though. “What you’ve just done is illegal,” he screamed at me. It didn’t seem the right moment to point out the irony of this statement.
The incident stayed with me for days, making the world seem very bleak and hopeless. Most people are good? I want to believe this so much, sadly I’m just not sure it’s possible.