I win the SPOTD award today. I formatted the hard drive on my computer about two months ago and whilst I saved everything to CD, I then misplaced the CD with email addresses on it. Couldn’t find it anywhere. We were pretty busy all the time so I didn’t look for it really hard but then the other night when we went to send out the word that we’d gotten hitched, it was critical we found all those email addresses of the people who hadn’t emailed us in two months so we could get their email address. Mind you, there’s possibly a moral in the story of whether you need to tell people who haven’t emailed you in two months but we’ll leave that for the time being.

In any event, after searching the work office and home office I could not find the CD and resigned myself to going back to search through a previous version of the email address book on a CD from late 2004. Since people’s email addresses have changed, this didn’t do much for me but it was better than nothing. Turned on the PC, hit the CD-ROM button to load the old CD and what should be sitting in the CD-ROM than the damn CD I’d been looking for over the past few days. Grr. Didn’t think to look inside the CD-ROM so for that I get the SPOTD award.

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Boarded the tram tonight to go down to the city (due to attending one of the Commonwealth Games athletics sessions). Di had come to my building so we both got on the tram together and found a block of four seats with two people in them. Di slid into the seat that was available whilst I remained standing, figuring that the guy who had his small bag (about large enough to hold 6-8 tennis balls) on the seat would look up at me and realise he needed to move it. When he didn’t, Di made a pointed remark to me that she thought I’d have a seat but that the bag was in the road so as soon as it was moved, I could sit down.

The guy looked up at me again and though he saw me standing there he didn’t make any effort to move the bag. Obviously I was going to have to ask the obvious. Politely I asked “Is that your bag, sir?” ready to follow it with “Would you mind moving it so I could sit down?”. I had decided that it wasn’t worth being aggressive about it and that a passive request would work in this situation. Without warning, the fellow snarled at me, ranting “What am I supposed to do with my bag? Put it on the floor? Like everyone else?”.

Whilst I was speechless for a second (my brain was beginning to form a response along the lines of advising him he could hang the bag off the roof-mounted passenger hand straps) Di quickly leapt in with a reply of “No, just put it on your lap, like this!” as she patted her own handbag sitting on her lap. Angrily the man ranted about how that was inappropriate and wanted to know why I couldn’t go sit elsewhere on the tram (there was a vacant seat some distance away but obviously that didn’t make sense because then we were not sitting together).

“Well sir, it makes more sense that I’d actually rather sit with my fiance…” was about as far as I got before the man exploded into a shouting rant about how he would move for me and he’d go and find another seat and that I was wrong to demand he move his bag. Naturally everyone around this scene was completely baffled by the bizarre problem he had with the simple concept of making a seat available to another passenger and several people started laughing at him.

“Don’t laugh at me! I’ve had a bad day! Don’t you laugh at me!” he continued to rant whilst people continued to snicker and giggle at him. He found another seat on the tram facing a different direction but I knew he was still within striking range and on the off-chance he was not only a SPOTD but decided to get violent and attack me from behind, I figured that discretion was the better part of valour and restricted myself to silent laughing, given away only by my shaking shoulders as the chuckling silently escaped. One other passenger on the tram who’d witnessed it all called out to me that he wanted to put *his* bag on a seat and asked me to please vacate the seat so he could put his “very important bag” on it. That sent myself and a number of other passengers into a fresh round of chuckling whilst the crazy SPOTD continued to fume aloud in his new seat.

Given the seat he chose, I knew he didn’t have a seat beside him but I couldn’t see what he ultimately did with his bag - I suspect it had to go on his lap given his violent opposition to just putting it on the floor of the vehicle. However, this was unable to be confirmed so we shall just have to wonder what the hell had created the SPOTD behaviour. And, as Di pointed out, why I continue to find these people on a regular basis…

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