Do people who skip queues think they’ve worked out a special life hack?

I witnessed a crime this week. Technically it had already been committed and I was watching the aftermath unfold. Zara, the shop responsible for my ill-advised purchases of “creative” tops that I never wear, became the crime scene. It was raining hard. When it rains, as tradition, we forget to function as a society and behave in the manner of a Titanic villain, pushing children and women out of the way to get to the lifeboats first.

The “keep left” courtesy on footpaths is forgotten about as people hug the edges of buildings and shopfronts hogging any hint of shelter. They march on, hoods up, eyes forward with determination that everyone else should step into the rain to make way for them. The paths become a game of low-stakes chicken; who will yield first – the rushed man with rugby dimensions crammed into a business suit, or the aul wan with a shopping trolley she’s using as a battering ram? Or will the woman with the salon-fresh blow dry and a rapidly disintegrating Penneys paper bag held over her head barge through them all? She’s going to a wedding later and she can’t be held back by kindness or any other weakness when there are GHD curls at stake.

I often wonder if these people think the rest of us don’t know what we’re doing

That’s what happens when we all have a shared, collective inconvenience like rain, crowds, traffic, packed public transport or cancelled flights. People perceive it as a threat to what we have to get done or the day we have planned, and some of us decide we must protect our own interests at all costs.

These people won’t be the ones to move down the back of the bus because they have decided they want to be close to the door when they eventually get off. That’s what suits them, even if it means others miss the bus because there’s no room at the front to get on.

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They will hug the buildings when walking with no worries about shouldering a stranger off the path – why should they be the ones who risk getting a single raindrop on their good jacket when someone else can?

It’s the cars who speed up when they see pedestrians crossing to scare them from walking out, saving themselves a possible 20 seconds of waiting for the person to reach the other side of the road safely.

On a busy flight with limited overhead locker space, it is the people who put their duty-free Toblerones in a space someone’s actual suitcase needs to fit in, simply because they want more legroom on a hour-long flight.

These were the people during the Covid pandemic who wore their mandatory masks under their noses for no other reason other than it was “hot” and “uncomfortable”, as though that wasn’t the case for everyone else.

I often wonder if these people think the rest of us don’t know what we’re doing. Do they think they’ve worked something out that everyone else hasn’t? Do they think they’re clever by doing something the rest of us know we can do but don’t because it negatively impacts others? I don’t think I’d ever get an answer if I asked – that would require self-awareness, and if they had that, they wouldn’t behave like this in the first place.

My cranky soul was warmed by a person thinking of others rather than themselves, and doing the right thing

I thought about it as I dodged another umbrella hook to the eye, as someone held a large corporate branded one as a Spartan would a shield and mowed a path down the street. Taking refuge in the comforting embrace of polyester dresses in my price range, I set about waiting out the worst in Zara.

A woman stepped up to the security guard, who was standing sentry in a doorway heaving with brollies, some in buckets and some flung on the floor in damp disgrace because they wouldn’t collapse properly.

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“Excuse me, do you have my umbrella it has XX on it?” she asked, mentioning the name of a very posh hotel close by. “I can’t find it.”

There was a good reason for that.

“Someone must have taken it,” the guard explained gently, holding his hands out in the international gesture of “I am very sorry for your troubles but there’s nothing I can do”.

“But now I have no umbrella,” she said in a voice so simple and sad that I went to give her mine but remembered it had actually broken on the way here and I had cursed it and its ancestors for flipping inside out at a busy intersection (something which is always very funny to watch happen to someone else, but is not funny at all when it happens to you).

The woman was cast adrift in a strange land full of umbrella thieves, left to face the elements on her own. Robbing someone’s umbrella when it’s bucketing down is a crime as petty as it is cruel, taking away their possession but also their preparation to face whatever the day had in store, and possibly their trust in others too. And all because someone didn’t want to get a bit wet, saw a good umbrella with a posh name on it and thought “I’ll take that”.

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I watched the victim hesitate as she stepped out. Would she steal someone else’s in turn to try to reclaim what was taken from her? An action that would trigger a chain of umbrella theft that would end in riots and military on the streets? Or worse?

I’m glad to report that she didn’t take one. My cranky soul was warmed by a person thinking of others rather than themselves, and doing the right thing. It was a shame really, because I was so close to getting someone to take that mangled, bent brolly off my hands.