Uncle steals my seat.

Most of the time, we expect everyone including ourselves to live life according to a set of unwritten rules. In Singapore, around eating places, there are a few such rules. Like the tissue packet rule. When you see a tissue packet on the table, it means the seat is chopped. In other words, someone is sitting there so you look for another seat. However, in life there are also idiots. Idiots do the opposite of what the unwritten rules say, because they are well... idiots.

What would idiots do when confronted with a tissue packet? Well it's all too simple. They just flick it on the floor, and when you come back with your food, they tell you that the seat doesn't have your name on it so anyone can sit on it. Most Singaporeans, being non confrontational, would just curse under their breath and find another seat. Some would attempt to argue with the idiot, but he's an idiot, which means he has difficulty adding two plus two, much less understanding your argument.

However, I met a new type of idiot today. The idiot of idiots. He came in the form of a mustachioed uncle. He didn't just steal a seat, he stole it when I was about to sit on it and in front of my whole astounded family. Here's what happened.

I was about to have dinner with my family in the basement foodcourt of Parkway Parade, and the whole place was full being a Saturday night. After circling the whole food court twice, we finally found a seat for 4 that had just been vacated by another bunch of people who had been eating there. We moved towards the seats, and what happened next was probably the most outrageous form of seat snatching I've ever seen in my life. Let me demonstrate with a diagram.

This is a typical food court setup of a table with four seats. The two seats in yellow were ALREADY OCCUPIED by my family members. I was about to sit on the red, and this uncle actually audaciously rushed in and sat on it. For a few seconds, there was a stunned silence. Obviously my family couldn't share the seat of 4 with this random uncle, because there were 4 of us and we needed all 4 seats. Secondly, 2 of the seats were already occupied, isn't that like the most obvious sign ever that the seats are TAKEN? The most irritating thing was, he kept looking to his left, away from my family, pretending that he couldn't see that he had obviously taken our seats, willing us to leave our seats for 4 so that he could sit on that one seat.

At this point I was so pissed both my arms were up in the air and I was about to confront him, but the rest of my family was like "don't make a scene in the food court, its crowded and we will lose face." Sounds familiar? Well I guess most Chinese families aren't really all that different. We are so afraid of losing face that when we meet a person that thick skinned, they win every time. In food courts, good guys finish last.

But since I was with my family, I decided that I shouldn't argue with him, and in the end we went to eat somewhere else. I couldn't help feeling totally disgusted though.