Manners battle

[firstfrost]

This morning, I was standing on the T, when a guy talking to his girlfriend decided to drop his newspaper (one of the little free Boston Metros, not a complicated heavy one) on the floor. After a few minutes of being vaguely irritated at him, I picked it up and handed it to him. "I think you dropped this, sir?" He gave me a dirty look, and took it. Then a few minutes later, he dropped it again. I picked it up for him again.

"Sir, you seem to be having some trouble with your paper."
"I dropped it, I'm sorry."
"I know. Here you go. There are trash cans in all the stations outside the train."
"Well, I'll throw it out there, then."
"Good."
"But until then, I'll leave it on the floor."

At this point, his girlfriend took the paper. I'm honestly not sure where I would have gone from there. Most people who I hand their trash to have the decency to be a little embarassed and throw it away later. And most people have the instinct to take something that's been handed to them, but he had clearly overcome his instinct by the second time.

I wonder if he talked her into dropping it on the floor again once I had gotten off the train.

Comments

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

Maybe the dropping, the accepting, the apologizing, and the dropping again were all reflexive.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

I do think the apologizing was reflexive - that's why the whole "I think you dropped this" trick works at all, because there's a standard polite protocol you follow. Sure, his apologies were totally insincere - but I was being insincere too, I didn't really think he had accidentally dropped an important belonging and would be grateful to get it handed back.

As an interaction, it's kind of interesting, in that neither of us was saying anything at all sincere, and both of us knew that. About all the content that was exchanged was something like

Me: I'm going to keep bugging you about this. Pester pester.
Him: You know, I'm not sure I care.
Girlfriend: Maybe I do care. Here' I've done the thing, you can go away again.