Dear A-Hole on the Bus; An open letter from me to you

[Eric_L]

Seated next to a lady on my flight the other day. She breaks out her 17" laptop and goes to work illustrating religious greeting cards. The tiny tray table being too narrow for the laptop, she's pushing the external mouse around mostly on the edge of the table and occasionally on her thigh. Her elbow is across the armrest and firmly rattling my ribs. After a while I lean away, move my arm to my side and straighten up gently, moving her arm back towards her side of the armrest. Apparently this offended my space-needy neighbor who decided she would display her dissatisfaction by pressing her elbow more firmly into my arm. I let her stew for a few minutes before looking her in the face with the best "bless your heart" smile I could muster and said "I'm doing everything I can to get out of your way, but I've got no more room to move. What do you think Jesus would do if you were poking HIM with your elbow?"

If I had a MAGA cap I think I might have had a good shot at causing her head to explode.

I was on a flight once, guy beside me was.....large. His arm was resting on me. This started right after takeoff. I just said " dude, you can't rest your arm on me the whole flight". I was not over the top, just a declarative comment. He moved his arm and tried to keep it off me the rest of the flight. His size was such that it was hard, he wasn't trying to jerk me around. Your person rose to new heights of rude.

[LOKNLOD]

Tony Alessandra's theory presumes that you know how people want to be treated. It also presumes that people want to be treated in a manner that's good for them. It's tough to improve on 2500 years of thought, but I guess it sells books.

If your goal is to treat people as they want, but hate victimhood culture, how do you treat people who insist on being treated as victims?

[JAD]

If your goal is to treat people as they want, but hate victimhood culture, how do you treat people who insist on being treated as victims?

Treating people as they want -- letting each person divine their own idea of good and evil, right and wrong -- is humanism at its finest, which is responsible for victimhood culture in the first place.

[NEPAKevin]

There would be nothing to talk about if asshole hipster (or is that redundant?) would have just let the guy who asked him to let him pass, pass. AHOB did not treat the other human being like a human being and waived any expectation of polite treatment.

[Totem Polar]

I'm not suggesting that we throat punch every rude asshole we run across, cause we'd be exhausted every day, but that we also shouldn't be taking it in the ass from these buffoons.

This strikes me as a fair and balanced outlook.

[LIST][*]You are assuming you have the power to change other people's behavior, you are ineffective at this.

I don't have a dog in this hunt, but I have to disagree with the above. Sure, we can't change people's behavior permanently, but I personally am not hung up on what people do outside of my purview. I'm only concerned with what they are doing in front of me, and that is something it may well be possible to change. I've seen *lots* of behavior changed in the moment. One can be very effective at this.