This Is This

This week a man on the train next to me put a newspaper down in between where we were sitting. I grabbed it to read and he huffed.

To put this into context, it was a free newspaper which are available everywhere. If you don’t know London, we have two free papers which are handed to commuters on their way home. Outside the main offices of the BBC, there are four to five vendors handing over papers to people to read on the tube.

The trains are also littered with the papers, because people read them and people leave them on seats for others to read. This is considered good paperquette, so it’s not unreasonable for someone to put a paper down and for you to pick it up, depending on the manner in which they left it.

But this guy discarded the paper. It was disposed of, and he took exception to the way I picked it up. I’m not ranting about it, but I wondered if any other London readers have had a similar experience, or the opposite thing where you have had your newspaper taken. Probably just me, I don’t know.

What I should have done is walked two feet away and got him another paper to replace the one I took. Maybe the paper had some kind of sentimental value. Perhaps it was a gift. Or maybe he’s just dumber than a box of hair and doesn’t realise that these papers are available everywhere. Maybe when he was given it he thought he’d won the lottery and didn’t realise these things are free to everyone. Maybe he was going to take it home for conversation material so he wouldn’t have to have another discussion with his wife about tyre pressure.

I don’t know the facts. But these newspapers are free.

And so is this website by the way, but that’s only because I don’t think anyone would pay for it and I haven’t figured out a way to do that yet. I would like to make money doing this, of course, but it would take a lot of time and I can’t sacrifice the things I already spend time doing.

Eh, whatever. I’m not complaining. Have a great weekend.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 8:47 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or you can skip to the end and leave a comment yourself.