Securing a seat on a jam-packed train can often feel like winning the lottery.
Whether you’re commuting or travelling for pleasure, it’s never ideal to board a train only to discover that you’ll be standing for hours due to a lack of available seating. This is especially true for those who are elderly, pregnant, or living with disabilities.
While most passengers would willingly surrender their seats to those in need, one man recently admitted to losing his cool when asked to do so.
In a Reddit post, the 23-year-old man detailed an encounter on a crowded train where an older woman, estimated to be around 60, requested his seat. He declined, leading to her loudly criticising “yelling about entitled healthy young people”.
However, the story took a turn when the man disclosed that he had a valid reason for remaining seated. Due to an injury sustained last year, he has a limp in his left leg and struggles to stand for more than 10 minutes without the aid of a cane, making it impossible for him to stand for over an hour on the train.
He recounted: “She started yelling about how entitled young healthy people like me can’t help an old lady like her.
“Some people started to look at me weirdly and I decided to channel the same energy as her and yelled back about the fact that I’m disabled and can’t stand for an hour plus until my stop and even showed my walking cane to show I’m not faking it.
“Long story short, she looked annoyed but people started to look at her weirdly now and she went to the next cabin.
“I was feeling good about myself but the old man sitting next to me said I could have been nicer about it. He was right, I didn’t need to go to her level, but some part of me is glad I did it to hope I taught her some lesson.”
The man argued that the woman made him “look like a d**k” for shouting at him for being “entitled”, when in reality he needed the seat just as much as she did.
And while some fellow train passengers weren’t keen on his behaviour, commenters on the Reddit post were on his side. Many said he did the right thing by sticking up for himself and agreed that he may have “taught her a lesson”.
One person said: “I’m so sick of people assuming ‘I can’t’ means ‘I don’t feel like it’. You made a scene and maybe you embarrassed her, but you also taught a lesson to anyone in earshot: disabilities are sometimes invisible or hard to detect.”
Another person chimed in: “In a perfect world she should have not assumed you were able to stand until your stop. In a perfect world you could have been nicer. This is not a perfect world. In this world you handled it very well.”