Impatient train woman

No, OP shouldn’t have to show ‘understanding and humility’ to people who make passive aggressive comments like ‘take your time why don’t you’.

You would benefit from going on a disability / inclusion course, your views are so ignorant.

You’d be cross at being asked to get up?

Then you would have been crosser had OP sat down and then asked you to stand up again so she can put her coat away.

Or are you saying OP should have the spent the entire journey being uncomfortable to placate you?

She was rude but you faffed.

It’s not selfish if you’re disabled to take the time to do that. But commuters have little patience, and they had no idea about your condition. They just want to find a seat and sit down.

I completely agree. Some posters are cross examining the OP on the extent of her disability, almost trying to ‘catch her out’ and get her to justify her needs. It is very peculiar.

Not odd at all to sit in the aisle seat on a train with plenty of spare seats. It says that you don’t want to sit next to anyone!
No wonder she was tetchy. You pushed a lot of buttons in those 30 seconds you took to make sure YOU were OK.

you sound likehard work.

I suspect it wasn’t clear you were struggling and in pain.
You do come off as quite entitled. I’d have been cross with you if I was the lady who stood to let you in or if I’d been in the queue of people waiting to get by.
We all have our ‘thing’ going on. You should be more understanding of their impatience (and perhaps have shown a little humility), just as you expect them to be understanding of your invisible arthritis.

Meh I can’t be bothered with people faffing about with this kind of stuff, oblivious to the fact a queue is forming. But then I am a pathological people pleaser, impatient with a a type A personality and would probably have ended up sitting the entire journey with my coat on rather than do this. So no, yanbu!

They probably wanted to sit down on one of the many seats the OP said were available.

Do you honestly think the OP was timing herself? No that is a throwaway figure and in no way can we regard it as accurate but regardless of that you have no way of knowing how painful it was for her to get up, stand there and then sit down again. The least the OP could have done was apologise but even better when the woman went to stand OP could have said to wait as she had to sort herself out. It isn't hard to be considerate.

Oh no, the woman had to stand up for 30 seconds.

What exactly were the other people waiting for? There's no where to go!

She wasn't blocking the aisle to twirl on her toes, she was putting her things away / down.

The woman was very rude. If a stranger told you 'take your time why don't you' for doing a perfectly ordinary thing you would be singing a different tune.

It should be mutual, having arthritis isn't nice as I know but it doesn't mean you just assume you can inconvenience other people. People blocking the aisles on trains are annoying and the woman didn't say anything that wasn't true did she.

I guess what you did OP was more than an average person usually does before sitting down in a train and was slower than an average person usually does. So from the outside it looked like slow unnecessary faffing. I got this a lot recently when my shoulder was hurt - people thought that I was faffing but I was just slow and careful.
However saying this, she was unnecessary rude. She should have learned by now (she didn’t sound 5y.o from your description) that people might have their reasons for things. But again you can easily forget it on a bad day. I’m sure we all guilty of it sometimes.
Apologies if someone mentioned this already.

Incredibly rude of her to comment. This is the sort of situation where you have to grin and bear it, like the queue to get to your seat on a plane. Inevitably you are behind at least one person who is loading an overhead locker. Public transport seems to bring out the worst in people.

The only question I have is did you perform these tasks with a sort of air of practiced nonchalance? Like there was no sense of urgency? It is sort of expected in this situation that you appear a little flustered and rush whilst apologising repeatedly. If you were acting like you were mindfully gathering up your belongings at the end of a yoga class it would irk the people waiting. Be honest.

It is helpful when people board public transport efficiently. Faffing around and creating congestion in carriages bottleneck the doors and contribute to train delays and missed connections.

Just wanted to come and report back that on my train last night, this man sitting in the window seat WOKE ME UP so he could get off at his stop!

An outrageous action I'm sure you'll all agree, he should have thought to ask when I was getting off when he shifted over to let me sit down.

...or not, as @W0tnow says, a totally mundane circumstance that most people manage to get past without making a snarky comment.

Quite! And the whole disability thing is irrelevant here. It doesn’t matter if it’s the person shedding their coat, or the rude woman in the seat, or the queuing passengers who have the disability. Hidden or not. It doesn’t matter if they’re all Olympic level fit. What we are describing here is a perfectly mundane set of circumstances that happens every day in situations where people are in close quarters. Jostling to get into a lift, finding a car park, getting your kids in and out of a car, getting you and your kids sorted before vacating your table at a cafe, packing your groceries at the supermarket. The list is endless. Sometimes people have to wait a few moments. It’s an almost imperceptible blip in the context of daily minor inconveniences. And if you choose to be part of society and it bothers you, then so what?

Absolutely agree with this. I said similar upthread that being held up for a minute or two by other people going about their business is just part of living in society. We ALL are in the way of someone else sometimes. If I'm doing a return at a supermarket, or reversing into my drive (as we are constantly lectured on here we must do), or sending three parcels at the post office or strapping a kid into a car seat so my door is open into the next space, or rinsing my cup at work I'm likely in someone's way for a minute. All of those things could be done in a way less convenient to me but better for someone else but it's life. The OP, if you read the updates, slipped a coffee cup out of an exposed side pocket, reached up and slid a bag and coat on the rack. The "queue" will build up in seconds on a train so that's not evidence it was taking ages. There's so literal tolerance for the basic existence of other people now it's quite worrying.

No, truth doesn’t hurt. But you know what does hurt? Having a problem with your spine and arthritis and then being expected to prioritise other people.

Learn some empathy.

Well, no. Not that truth. Not particularly. Waiting for 30 seconds? This is a classic case of a pile on for absolutely no reason whatsoever other than people want to. It’s really very curious. Almost 20 years on here and I’ve never quite understood it. It’s like the more benign the issue, the more insistent people get that there has been some major social infraction.

Yes very likely. Someone with a problem with their spine and twisting to take coat off is an issue, then the rest of it. Thirty seconds it isn't but regardless the woman said she'd kept other people waiting and she had. Sometimes the truth hurts doesn't it.

You weren’t selfish at all. You made the mistake of being a woman who had the temerity to make a few people wait for you. Your role is life is to facilitate everyone else to get settled in first.