Pregnant Woman Refuses To Get Off A Mall Massage Chair She's Not Using After A Young Couple Ask To Use It
She wasn't even using it.
Thiago Borges / Pexels A pregnant woman, who is 8 months along, decided that one day, she wanted to take a visit to her local shopping center and grab a bite of her favorite ice cream from her favorite ice cream shop.
Unfortunately for her, the shop was super busy, and being the very pregnant woman that she is, resigned herself to taking a seat on a massage chair (one of two) outside of the store.
When she was asked by a young couple to get off the massage chair, she refused.
In her post on the subreddit “r/AmItheA--hole” (AITA) — a place for people to air their grievances and receive the opinions of strangers who can tell them if they’re in the wrong — she explains that being 8 months pregnant means that “I often get quite tired when I stand or walk for long periods of time.”
After she got her ice cream, took her seat in one of the massage chairs, and began eating her frozen dessert, a young couple approached her.
“Once I started eating the snack, I got approached by a couple that was in their late teens, or perhaps early twenties,” she explains. “They asked me to get off the chair since I wasn't getting a massage, and they wanted to receive such a service together, which I refused to do.”
Since she allegedly “could not stand for more than a few minutes at a time,” she told the young couple that if they could find her somewhere else to sit or wait for her to finish her “relatively large dessert,” then they could have the seat.
Since she wasn’t using the chair, the young woman was understandably upset with her.
“She told me to stop acting as if I was ill, that just because I was pregnant, the world did not revolve around me, and because I was not paying for a massage, I had no right to sit on the chair,” she continued.
The young woman told her partner to go get a security guard, and he returned with one moments later, but the young woman did not get the result that she wanted.
“The guard took my side, and asked the couple to either take turns using the second massage chair or wait for me to finish eating, which upset the girl quite a bit,” she explained.
“She accused me of being selfish and preventing the owner of the chairs from earning money, and left with her partner.”
After hearing multiple conflicting opinions from her younger sister and her older sister, she wasn’t sure if she was in the wrong for refusing to move.
The people of Reddit assured her that she was definitely in the wrong for not moving from the massage chair.
Despite her 8-month pregnancy situation, Redditors still feel that she was in the wrong and largely for one reason — those massage chairs were for business purposes.
“So, let me put this situation in another context. The massage chairs are a business. Someone installed those with the goal of making money from people paying to use the massage function,” the top comment read.
“Would you take your ice cream from one store and go sit at the tables of another restaurant and refuse to vacate when someone else wants to use that table to eat at that restaurant? That's what you did here.”
Another user explained that while it was okay to sit there when no one wanted to use it, she was in the wrong the moment she decided not to get up for people who did want to use it.
Many suggested that she (and wondered why she didn’t) just go eat in her car the next time a similar situation were to arise.
In an update, she claimed to understand why she was, in fact, in the wrong for taking up the seating for another business.
Hopefully next time, she’ll order her ice cream in a to-go bowl and leave the seating for other businesses alone.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Keep up with his rants about current events on his Twitter.