I went to the sauna as usual yesterday

Nothing really happened there, I got a few sweats in and on the way home decided to pop into my local store to pick up a few things for dinner

I know the women who work there, I've been going in for years, so we're familiar with each other and when I walked through the entrance, two of the ladies were standing in the lobby, one was cleaning up a broken jar or something and a puddle of liquid on the floor

She has a habit of dropping things, so I made the obvious joke....

What you dropped now?!

She looked at me and said something along the lines of.... 'You might want to go over there'

It was an odd thing to say

So I walked further in

And that's when I realised something was happening

Over by the checkouts, one of the other women who worked there was dealing with a shoplifter and when I say dealing with him, I mean dealing with him

He was a fairly substantial guy, and he had apparently attempted to conceal several bottles of liquor down his pants

The woman dealing with him is tiny compared to him, but she's also one of those people who clearly don't take no shit from no one, she was aggressively removing the bottles and telling him to get out

And this is where I experienced something I wasn't expecting

I felt an almost immediate sense of male responsibility

Not because anyone had asked me to do anything

Nobody said... Can you help?

But there was I, a big guy, watching a relatively small woman physically dealing with a large man, and some primitive part of my brain seemed to say....

You should probably do something

So I walked over

And then...

I stood there

Like a lemon

Because what, exactly, was I supposed to do?

Was I supposed to grab him?

Push him?

Hold him?

Tackle him?

And at what point does 'helping' become assault?

The man was quite clearly attempting to steal, there was no doubt about what was going on, but that didn't just give me permission to start laying hands on him

And then I noticed something even stranger

There was a security guard standing near the entrance

He was watching

I looked at him

He looked at me

And the expression on his face seemed to say...

Bro, I'm not getting involved

And suddenly the whole thing felt surreal

Almost like The Truman Show

Everyone was standing around, watching the scene unfold, but nobody seemed to know what their part was supposed to be

The store staff were dealing with the shoplifter

The security guard was watching

I was standing there wondering whether I was supposed to become some sort of amateur bouncer

And the other customers?

They were frozen

Absolutely frozen stiff

That was the bit that really stayed with me

Once the liquor had been removed and the shoplifter was being ushered towards the door, I looked around the store

Nobody was moving

Nobody was saying anything

People were just watching

It was as though someone had suddenly removed the script

And I've been mulling it over ever since

Because normally, society works well because we agree to follow a collection of unwritten rules

We know how we're supposed to behave in a queue

We know that we don't just walk into someone's house

We know that you don't shout at strangers for no reason

We know that you wait your turn

We know that you don't take things that don't belong to you

We know how to behave at the fiat mines, in restaurants, in a taxi bus train etc

Most of these rules aren't written down

Nobody has to explain them

They're simply known to us

And that's what makes society function right!

But what happens when somebody suddenly decides they're not playing the game?

That's what I think I witnessed in that store

The shoplifter had stepped outside the normal rules

And everyone else suddenly seemed to lose their bearings

Because we're all very comfortable with the idea of...

That's not allowed

We're much less comfortable with the question of...

So what are you going to do about it?

And that's where the whole thing becomes complicated

Because if everyone simply says 'Not my problem' then stealing becomes very easy

Let's say a guy walks into a store, fills a bag with whiskey and walks out

Nobody stops him

The next person does the same

And another

At some point, the shop is basically saying, just take everything bro

So at some point somebody has to make a stand

But who?

The store assistant on 10 bucks an hour?

The security guard on probably the same?

A customer?

And how far are they supposed to go?

That's where our neat little social rules then become very gray

We expect there to be law and order but most people don't actually know where the boundaries are when they're standing in the middle of an unfolding incident

We're told not to take the law into our own hands

We're told to report crime

We're told not to use unnecessary force

But we're also vaguely aware that, in the real world, if everyone simply stands back and waits for someone else to deal with everything, some things won't get dealt with at all

And I guess that's why everyone froze

Not because they were cowards

Not because they didn't care

But because nobody knew what the next line in the script was

For a few minutes, normal rules of society stopped working

And we're all stood there waiting for somebody else to tell us what to do

OK, yes I know there's going to be some keyboard warriors who say they'd have jumped in like Conor McGregor...... Yeah ok big guy, we know how tough you are 🤣🤣