I was standing on a crowded bus and this guy walks in and sits down in the only available chair. The woman behind him is obviously struggling with her little boy and she looks at him incredulously, but he – as oafs on public transit do – just looks down… or away… so he doesn’t have to confront the fact that he’s an asshole.

So, I said to him, “You could have left the seat for the woman with the baby, you know….”

Oafs don’t respond well to criticism, but this guy came up with a brilliant and witty response. He looked up at me and said, “Yeah.”

So we looked at each other long enough to make certain the other understood the contempt in which he was held by… the other… sorry, this is how this sentence came out of my head and it’s so convoluted that my blogging software is preventing me from changing it. To mock me, I think.

As the bus trudged on, Oaf began to look around uncomfortably. The woman with the kid moved past him. The bus stopped and a couple of old ladies came in and one of them made eye contact with Oaf. He graciously offered his chair to her and she accepted. Oaf even stood aside to let me off the bus first when we were getting off at the same stop. He just needed that little nudge.

I recently had a back and forth with a male friend on Facebook (you know who you are!) that sits on the train and gives up his seat for pregnant women and old ladies… but not for ladies in general. But that’s undignified! A perfectly healthy male has no business sitting down when a lady is standing. Granted, some ladies aren’t ladies at all… but there are some courtesies, decencies, and anachronisms that are worthwhile preserving. This is one of them.

I’m about ready to make announcements on subway cars to point out men that are in the look-down position so they won’t have to get up – for even old people and pregnant women, or parents with infants. How do these men not want to pick themselves up and pound their own heads into the subway platforms? Not standing up for a pregnant woman!!!

The only thing that has kept me from bad-mouthing these oafs is… well, my will to live. You just don’t mess with people in NYC. Or Texas. Or certain neighborhoods north of Paris. Baltimore… don’t mess with people in Baltimore.

No, the real reason I don’t mess with the oafs is that they could have a health reason for wanting to sit. It’s not likely – there are way more oafs than ailments – but in any one case it’s usually possible.

So I want to start taking pictures of them and then asking them what ails them. If they say that nothing ails them, then I may say something like, “Oh, I thought something must be wrong since you’re sitting there while this pregnant woman is struggling to keep her balance.” Then if they don’t get up, I’d like to have a card that I can give them with the name of a Web site like, OafsOnPublicTransit.org, and an explanation that a picture of him sitting down and the person that should have been sitting down instead of him is going to be published there.

Am I likely to really do this? Absolutely not! But… oh… I would love to… I would really love to!

People don’t seem to know this. I’m constantly being asked when I’m on my computer at Starbucks whether I’m paying for the connection. Also, whenever I hear someone say that they have however many minutes left in the time they bought, I interrupt them and say, “Hey, you’re an idiot.” Then, I explain how it’s done:

1. Get a Starbucks debit card. It’s free. You’re going to buy stuff at Starbucks anyway, so just do it in two steps instead of one: put the money on the card and then buy what you’re going to buy anyway using the card.
2. Go to Starbucks.com and register your card. There’s a number on the back of the card that you use for this.
3. Use the login you created to sign in to “att wi-fi” when the Wi-Fi default page opens up in your browser.

This is supposed to give you up to two hours per day for free. I’ve found that I can stay on much longer than two hours. I don’t actually know that they knock you off, but it hasn’t been a problem for me.