What Would You Do?
Some situations happen so fast that it seems to me there can only be one way to react. After all, when something happens which is fairly out of the ordinary, most people wouldn’t know what to do. Not if it happened to them.
Take me at the train station the other day, for example. I was watching a man some way down the platform. I wasn’t the only one. Most people were watching him. Like me they were pretending not to watch him, but you couldn’t help it. He was singing to himself loudly, and the way he was loitering around a group of tourists just didn’t look right. Then he started to run.
It was only as he came towards me that I realized he was holding a bag, taken off the shoulder of one of the Japanese tourists. Clearly he was an experienced runner and quite sure of himself. The line he took between the people around him seemed planned and pre-determined, as though he could see the future. I looked about me and had one of those odd moments when a thought triggered by something I had seen (a woman straight out of Baywatch) mixed with the words on a sign: breast implants pay monthly.
I had a brief flash of what was about to happen. In this vision I stuck my foot out at just the right time and tripped the thief up. He went flying and was down for the count.
Only when he approached me, I froze up. Instead of putting my foot out I stepped out the way, allowing the man to rush past.
If I could do it all again (or should I say, if I had to do it all again) I would stick my foot out. As far as I know they didn’t catch the thief, and the Japanese tourist is still without her bag.
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