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As I said, being in the wrong is not a zero sum game. They can be completely wrong in their actions, and she can be wrong in hers. I certainly am not saying that she was, because (as you, @Amadan and I all agree) they are likely to be lying just to save face. All I'm saying is that, if they are telling the truth, the nurse can be wrong without absolving them one bit.
I'm not trying to defend them, and I don't understand why you act like I am. I'm simply pushing back on the idea that to say the nurse acted poorly means that the kids are absolved for their actions.
How is paying to rent a bike that's available wrong? Someone wanting to keep it, but who didn't remnt it because they have to return it before getting a second free use, needs to allow other free and paying renters to do so.
If you want to check out a library book again, it needs to go through the return process so that you can't just keep it indefinitely when others wish to check it out.
Except that isn't what happened according to the teens. According to them, what she did was to scan a bike that one of them was sitting on and had said he was going to still use. This is roughly equivalent to if you find someone at the library who has a book on the desk in front of them, who says "sorry but I'm going to check this book out still", and you snatch it off the desk and check it out yourself. That isn't breaking any laws or anything but would be kind of a dick move.
I'm not saying that this nurse is the worst person in the world, or that she should be fired, or anything like that. I am just saying that as the kids tell it, she was kind of rude to them. That's all.
He may have been sitting on it, but he hadn't rented it, thus it was available it just had someone attempting to intimidate others from using it until the system allowed him to get another inexpensive turn. He can either pay to extend his rental or allow someone else to use the shared rental.
This seems far more like someone claiming that they're previous check out should give them priority over another being first in line after they return a highly demanded book to me.
Again, nobody is saying that the kids were in the right to do this in the first place. I agree that it certainly seems like they were in the wrong to try to monopolize the e-bikes the way they were. But, if we assume their account of things to be true, she acted poorly on her end as well. If someone is monopolizing a book at the library, the correct course of action is to report them to the authorities, not to take matters into your own hands and snatch the book off the desk in front of them.
This is what I'm talking about when I keep saying it isn't a zero-sum game. Assuming that the kids' account is true:
The kids were wrong to sit on the bikes and call dibs on them.
The woman was wrong to just scan the bike while the kid was sitting on it trying to call dibs, rather than just finding another option for transportation.
The kids were wrong to not just give up the bike they wanted to use so the tired pregnant lady could have it.
The kids compounded that wrong by filming the whole thing and trying to look like innocent victims.
At no step of this sequence of events did anyone act correctly. I don't need to overlook the kids' behavior to assess that the woman was rude in her own way under this view of the events.
Which is a nice catch 22 since reporting black men to the authorities is a much bigger violation of norms since they're at high risk of being shot. This sounds to me like her option is to be a second class citizen who can't ever win.
It's an available bike, if the guy sitting on it wants to use it, he was welcome to check it out or extend his ride. Since he didn't it's now anyone's bike to claim. It's a shared resource. This is like saying that one person can sit in front of the crab legs at a buffet just eating them as the bucket is refilled, and anyone who reaches past them is violating norms and partly to blame. No, the person not letting others use the unclaimed bike is wholly in the wrong.
That's an idiotic norm and anyone who espouses it needs to be slapped so hard they get knocked into orbit. There's no catch-22 here, IMO.
Again, you're treating being wrong like a zero-sum game. It's not.
This is not the right way to express things around here.
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