Thursday, January 12, 2006

Hmmm....

Okay, I'm all for everyone's rights and let's be nice and all the sugary happiness. But when I walk onto a BART train to find an overweight woman sitting on the handicap bench with her hunking go-cart parked in front of her, so that she's essentially taking up a whole bench, taking up the area in front of her so it's hard for people to walk by her, and blocking the bench perpendicular to her bench, I'm sorry, you should be chucked off the train for being inconsiderate to your able-bodied fellow passengers.

And this was a handicap car. Which means there is a wide-open space on the other side of the door where a handicap bench usually is, but is not, so the anyone who is handicapped and has to sit in an apparatus (such as a go-cart for fat people), can park themselves there and stay out of the way. Oops, I mean have their own space.

So there was this wide, empty space on the other side of her that she could have easily used, but chose not to. Now, if I wanted to just plop myself on the ground there for some reason, and a handicap person rolled themselves in, I would have to move. Because I'm not handicapped. So why is it okay for this lady, who may or may not have been truly handicapped to take up that much space??? (She wasn't that overweight -- in fact, a lady much larger than than the go-cart lady squeezed herself into the perpendicular bench next to the go-cart woman. The go-cart woman made her only effort to accommodate another passenger by moving her go-cart back 2-inches.)

Believe me, I was not the only one a bit perturbed. Every single person who was not handicapped (okay, there were none), walked onto that train, eyeballed this women, squeezed by, sat down and scowled.

I saw her move her legs. I admired her as she lounged with her legs propped up on the foot rest of her go-cart, reading. I watched her launch her fat body onto her go-cart when she was getting off the train. I'm not going to say she's lazy because maybe something was really wrong with her, but man, she had a lot of nerve, rights or no rights.

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