It’s nice to stake your claim on something, right? Nothing beats claiming a chair in a theater or clinic with a good jacket or bag plopped right on top. It gives people a feeling of security, knowing that no matter what and according to an old unspoken custom, they’ll still have somewhere to sit down when they come back from wherever they are.
Occasionally, though, people take this too far and it turns from a polite reservation to unrestrained hogging. It’s up to others to deal with this hogging - like this hotel’s staff, moving belongings from sunbeds so they're available to everyone.
More info: TikTok
TikToker Roberta's satisfying video went viral, celebrating hotel staff for a rarely seen practice
Image credits: @renovatewithroberta
In the vid, hotel security was removing towels and other belongings from sunbeds, occupying all the best seats before the day had begun
Image credits: @renovatewithroberta
Watch the full video here:
Entitledness seems to be becoming more and more popular as time goes on, or perhaps we're just more exposed to it online
Influencer Renovate With Roberta, who refurbishes everything from furniture, to garden paths, to entire rooms (and also takes her duckling to work), shared a vid less than a month ago that went pretty viral. In this video, employees of a Tenerife hotel, GF Fanabe, are removing towels and belongings from sunbeds.
Apparently they have been put there to “reserve” them - either from last evening or the same day very early morning. These people must’ve naively hoped that plopping down something on a chair means it’s yours forever, so when you finally want to use it (10 hours down the line, of course), it’s all yours.
TikTok user jamielee670 mentioned that she would cut out the middleman of people getting up from their “reserved” sunbeds and going for a swim. Instead, she’d throw the beds into the pool. Isn’t that convenient? You don’t even need to get up to be in the pool now, thanks!
Several people mentioned the hotel by name and said that they also saw the staff doing the very same thing during their stay, cheering them on.
People asked “well, what if you went into the pool or took a quick bathroom break?” It seems that the staff mainly does this in the morning, to prevent people from taking up the best seats in advance.
Image credits: Ata Ebem Kindel Media
Commenters also mentioned that guests are liable to start conflicts when they see that their carefully reserved spots have been cleared and, even worse, that their belongings have been tampered with.
Yet, it seems that people weren’t as entitled in the past as they are now. Think back to 10 or 20 years ago; how often was it that you saw various outrage videos or read stories of “Karens”?
The Karen term wasn’t half as popular then as it was now - it really didn’t even have the same meaning, long ago.
It could be that we simply have gotten more exposure to entitled people raging. For example, with social media occupying more and more of the public’s consciousness, us being glued to our screens more often, we are just more aware of these things. Especially when they become viral memes.
Although it’s difficult to say whether the behavior is new or not, you can certainly find entitled people almost everywhere.
Medium Writer Bebe Nicholson talks about modern entitlement and the forms it takes. According to her, when you feel as if you’re above the rules, you’re simply entitled. The more wealth you have, the easier it is to be above the rules. And thus you get billionaires and politicians who will talk down to the public and emphasize how much effort we have to put in to protect our planet from warming, while they and their corporations create more pollution than any one of us will in our entire lifetimes.
Image credits: Mikhail NilovKindel Media
This kind of behavior “trickles down,” which was especially apparent during the pandemic, when people felt as if the need to wear masks didn’t apply to them - which was also enforced by some super wealthy people.
Thus, simple entitlement goes from a single bad action or character trait to something far more insidious and dangerous. When many people feel so strongly entitled to something, it’s no surprise that at some point it has to become dangerous.
There are things we can do to stop this backslide, though. It’s better to listen to entitled people, rather than try to contradict them, because it’ll likely inflame them more and the whole ordeal will take that much longer. When they run out of steam, it’s possible to deal with them, especially if they’re calmer.
Children learn from our example, so we should avoid acting entitled ourselves or fostering such attitudes in them. It’s important for kiddos to learn that they can’t have every single thing they desire.
Oh, and you should avoid being entitled as a general rule, not just for the kids. After all, you don’t want your name to become synonymous with “entitled”, do you? Thought not.
Roberta’s vid collected more than 170k views, 3.8k likes and 231 comments. The commenters mainly celebrated the staff, but some people were contradicting and confused about the situation.
If belongings being ripped away from hotel seating is your guilty pleasure, Bored Panda has you covered, with another similar article.
Don’t forget to share your own story of entitled people taking up public seating and how you dealt with them in the comments below.
The community enjoyed this solution, saying that it should be implemented in hotels and resorts worldwide
Image credits: Kindel Media (not the actual photo)
