When Dan, Liz and I met up in Vegas and made our way to the check-in line at our hotel, we found it to be about 200 people deep. We settled in, knowing it would take some time and began planning our day with the giddy excitement of 6-year olds on Christmas Eve.
Suddenly, I get tapped on the shoulder and a hotel employee says “Are you three together? Please come with me.” We looked at each other nervously, wondering what we could have done to have been expelled from the hotel before we had even checked in. She brought us to a small room and finally explained that ‘the wait in line would be over 35 minutes and she didn’t want me standing that long’. She guided us into the VIP section, asked us to sit, brought us water and told us that we could take care of check-in there when the first available agent was free.
Dan and Liz gave each other high fives. They had the golden ticket! They claimed that by bringing me along, they’d be treated like royalty. And I have to admit, that what it felt like. And it was none too soon. After the past few weeks I spent commuting to work with people, sitting in the priority seating section of the bus I might add, who would look up at you and quickly look back down at their books so that it might be believable to those around them that they had hadn’t seen me, I have to admit that the special treatment felt nice. I am pregnant, yes, but I don’t feel that I always *need* a seat right now. My balance is fine and I’m feeling great, but not everyone is. These priority seat stealers don’t just ignore me, they ignore the older, ‘less healthy’ riders as well. I’ve actually seen the same lady, walking with a cane, make her way past the halfway point in the bus before someone would offer her a seat. Ridiculous. These people should be embarrassed by their behaviour.
Once I returned home from the trip, everything seemed to change. Perhaps the desert air helped my belly grow heaps, but people have really started to notice me. Especially the last two days in a row when two ladies offered up their seats and would literally not take the 12 no’s I gave them for an answer. Today’s lady was relentless. After telling her that I was fine and not to worry (again and again), she sat there fidgeting for a few minutes before getting up and saying “I just can’t sit here like this. It’s going to haunt me all day.”
So I sat down, uncomfortably, as this 60+ woman stood beside me shifting her weight back and forth from leg to leg, in obvious discomfort. It may have been guilt that made her offer her seat to me in the first place, but perhaps the lazy lumps seated all around us took notice of her generosity and decided that thay might follow her example the next time around.
Something tells me that is wishful thinking.
dan - These lazy lumps are the same people that:
– use speakerphone in open air cubicle environments (happening as I type this, much to my annoyance)
– toss cigarette butts out their car windows thinking it’s not disgusting and not littering
Jessie - Plus, the Lazy Lumps *not to be confused with “Lady Lumps”* are:
– generally bad tippers
– people who can’t “spare a square”
– colleagues who rat you out for checking the score on World Cup Soccer (happened to me, I was in trouble. Big trouble – yet anything goes when it’s the Olympics! Bastards).