This actually happened a couple of weeks ago when I was heading to PAX, but I only randomly remembered it now.
I hopped on the bus to head downtown, still a bit groggy. The bus was fairly empty. I was about to choose one empty row, but realized someone had left a Bible sitting there…so I sat in the row behind it.
I rode the bus for about 15 minutes until I got to the stop where a couple of my friends were joining me. During that time period, at least six people were about to sit in that row, saw the Bible, turned back, and kept walking to another spot on the bus. But by the time my friends got there, the bus was pretty full. One sat next to me, and the other looked dejectedly at the Bible before sitting next to it.
The woman sitting near us laughed, and quipped about how only in Seattle would people avoid a Bible so much.
I had assumed someone left the Bible there as a form of evangelizing. But my friend flipped through it, and it was full of notes and business cards and phone numbers and flyers. Looks like it was nothing more than an organizational tool someone had left behind.
I presume you handed it over to the driver as lost property?
Something like that happened to me today on CityBus, except instead of a Bible, it was a paper bag from Burger King.
I could use this little fact as a form of social engineering…. Hmm….
It is possible that they were not avoiding it because it was a bible. They might have been avoiding it as a marker that the seat was already taken.
Of course nobody wanted to sit alone on the bench with the bible; it would be like sitting in their own pew!
I think I’d be worried about sitting next tot the bible, then finding myself trapped by a man with Watchtower magazines watching from a few rows behind.
You could have grabbed it and looked as if you were reading it. If someone looked at you or commented you could have said “I’m just picking out the AWESOME parts like Abraham killing his son Isaac because his invisible friend told him to!! It’s a AWESOME book!”
If I was a monkey, I’d totally smear shit all over it.
Really? That’s a bit hostile. For all the problems Christianity has, and there are plenty… it’s still just a book.
If it were a piece of crap, people would have behaved in the same way.
You can’t fool the people.
Surely you must know by now that Seattle has among the lowest church attendance in the country. It would be completely commonplace for Seattleites to passive-agressively ignore that bible Evangelists get laughed at here.
To be fair she specified that she would do this if she were a monkey, which implies not only a propensity for smearing shit, but also a certain lack of cognitive sophistication.
Men are just the same about handbags – at least here in the UK.
Heh-heh, you said “left behind.”
Now I have this sudden urge to move to Seattle!
What did you do with the Bible? I feel bad for whoever lost their organizational tool. I’m always losing things, it sucks. And I suppose it’s a double-blow to somebody who is religious.