Today is a wet day. As I got on the train, I happened to sit right opposite a seat that had a leak above it. The leak would drip when the train was moving and it dripped a lot, so the seat below it was quite wet. Slowly people boarded the train and they all occupied the seats around me, but still avoiding the one directly in front of me. No one actually noticed the leak, as it’s only visible as the train moved. No one knew that seat was wet.

Finally, a gentleman decides to take that seat, but before he sat down, I decided to say something.

Fehed: Sorry, that seat’s wet.
Gentleman: ??? .. oh, thanks.
Fehed: ^_^

As the journey continued, the rest of the seats were all occupied except that seat. Suffice to say, people would attempt to sit there and I would now intervene. “Sorry, that seat’s wet.”, I kept saying and they’d thank me and move on. Eventually, growing tired of the same phrase, I started playing around with it.

• Sorry, that seat is a tad moist
• Excuse me miss, there’s a drip there
• Sir, I wouldn’t sit there, it’s damp

None of them really had any ring to them that the original phrase had though, so I moved back to just saying “the seat’s wet”. After a while, I was surprised that I’m the only one saying anything. People were perfectly happy just staying quiet and letting others attempt to take the seat. People who I had saved from getting a damp butt, just sat there minding their own business.

The woman next to me stopped reading her book for a moment, turned to me and asked “What will they do when you get off the train?”. Coincidentally, the next stop was mine. So I got off and started dissecting this experience. If I was any smarter, maybe I’d have come to some kind of a conclusion about it. Right now, all I have is “That’s just fucking weird… are people really that badly anti-social?”

I did however remember a social experiment someone attempted on a train. They had an actor stand around till the carriage got crowded and then pretend to faint. There were two instances of this experiment. The first, the actor would faint and fall to the ground, and people eventually moved towards him to offer some kind of help.

The second, the actor would faint and fall to the ground and there would be a hint of blood trickling from his mouth. During this instance, no one approached the man on the floor. Was it out of fear? Was it out of a feeling of inadequacy? Blood from the mouth would make anyone believe that it was quite serious, so maybe they thought “Well I’m not a doctor, I probably can’t do anything”.

The behaviour in that experiment is understandable to an extent. But… would it really kill people to say “sorry, that seat’s wet”?