YouTube video shows man in China faking a fit just to get somewhere to sit, but at what cost?

Short of putting on a dress and a fake pregnancy bump, or elaborate facial makeup to look several decades older, it can be tricky for a young man to get a seat on a busy train. No one looks on with sympathy when a young person, in the prime of their life, is forced to stand, sometimes for whole tens of minutes. Presumably fed up that his elders were hogging all the seats on the train, a chap from China came with an ingenious trick to get himself somewhere to plonk his bum: scare the bejesus out of his fellow passengers with a fake seizure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60xj8KjaEsw

While normally we’d feel sorry for the passengers duped and turned out of their seats, who are almost certainly more deserving, the fact that no-one tried to help the poor young man appearing to have a fit makes us rather less sympathetic. Of course we don’t know what preceded the video, which starts with him already lying face first on the (no doubt pretty dirty) floor, so we shouldn’t judge.

▼ Step 1: Kick your legs, thrash about as though having a fit.

▼ Step 2: Get up, and send fellow passengers scrambling.

▼ Step 3: Look smug, and make it even less likely that people having genuine seizures will get timely help.

Despite the video only showing about two seconds of him shaking and kicking his legs, the people around him are quick to react and almost stampede over him in their rush to get away, leaving him almost a whole bench to sit down on. Afterwards he looks pretty pleased with himself. It’s a pity that we don’t get to see what happened next, as some women look less than happy at being displaced.

So if you’re prepared to make a spectacle of yourself, risk some serious glaring afterwards, and de-seat those more who may actually need to sit down, all you have to do is scare the hell out of everyone in your carriage, and hope that there isn’t a trained medical professional sitting there. Drawing attention to yourself might put most of us off, but in China it often seems that results and function trump form anyway. The trick also relies on having space for the seated passengers to vacate to, less helpful on Japanese trains where it takes three staff pushing to get the passengers to resemble sardines. And if even a brass band playing doesn’t elicit a response, a full grand mal may not either.

Source: YouTube/BTMG via Hachimakiko