Man Berated After Helping An Elderly Woman Put Her Bag In A Plane's Overhead Bin
He was just trying to help, but others didn't see it that way.
Space_Cat / Shutterstock The old cliché “no good deed goes unpunished” might just be true.
One man was scolded for trying to do the right thing after helping a woman on a flight.
A man who stepped in to help an elderly woman on a flight was berated by another passenger.
An anonymous woman shared the experience she and her boyfriend had when boarding a Delta flight on Reddit.
“Mostly posting to get this off my chest,” she said.
She went on to detail a bizarre run-in with an “older” man and woman on their recent flight.
“While boarding (as a lowly Comfort+), we were stuck behind an older lady in first class (row one) who was having trouble putting her carry-on in the overhead bin,” she said. “My boyfriend offered to help her, so she got out of the way into her seat, and he lifted her suitcase into the bin and moved on.”
Really, the story should have ended there or maybe included a “thank you.” Instead, it quickly devolved into something dramatic.
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“An older man in row two saw him walk past first-class and immediately yelled, ‘Hey! That space is for first class only!’ and started looking around for backup,” she recounted.
While this woman was interested in setting the record straight, her boyfriend thought it was better just to move on.
“I tried to inform him as I walked past that my boyfriend was only helping, but he didn’t hear me,” she said. “My boyfriend just shook his head at me and rolled his eyes and said, ‘Keep walking.’”
The woman understood it was minor but still thought it was worth mentioning.
“I’m pretty annoyed, although this obviously … isn’t worth any confrontation,” she concluded. “But I do feel like we need to chill out a little with assuming the worst in people.”
Why do we assume the worst of others?
The woman has a valid point. We tend to assume the worst about people. Instead of thinking her boyfriend could have been helping an elderly lady, this other man automatically jumped to the conclusion that he was trying to use space reserved for first-class passengers.
Author and executive coach Lisa McLeod addressed this issue in her newsletter.
“We evaluate ourselves based on our aspirations,” she explained. “Yet we usually evaluate others based on their actions.”
She continued, “We yearn for something better. We assume because others haven’t given voice to similar desires, they don’t possess them.”
We can see the complete spectrum of our own feelings. We know what holds us back now, but we also know what we hope for in the future. We see ourselves as complete beings with a past, present, and, perhaps most importantly, a future.
We do not view others the same way. We only see the one-dimensional aspect that is immediately available to our observation and judgment. We see only their current actions and spare no thought for what they could become or even what they hope to become.
Fellow Redditors were just happy to hear about someone doing the nice thing.
While the girlfriend’s fellow Reddit users cracked plenty of jokes at this elderly man’s expense, they were also happy someone had done something to help someone else, which seems to be getting rarer by the minute.
“Thank you and your boyfriend for being wonderful people and helping someone who needed it,” one person said. “Sorry, you had to deal with a jerk.”
“Maybe ask him why HE didn’t help the little old lady,” another suggested.
A third added, “Your boyfriend did the correct response.”
While it can be difficult to see beyond people’s current actions sometimes, it’s always worth it to really try to take someone in as a whole person and not automatically assume the worst of them.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer for YourTango who covers entertainment, news, and human interest topics.