I eat in the cafeteria a lot, so I know its unwritten rules pretty well.

The tables are fairly large, built for four people, with two seats on each side. When it is not busy, people usually take a whole table for themselves. If they do have to share, they tend to sit diagonally from each other. That is basically the cafeteria version of a comfortable social distance.

This cafeteria is shared by several office buildings in the complex, so once the lunch rush starts, finding a place to sit turns into that familiar routine of walking around with a tray and squeezing into whatever spot is available.

At lunch today, right in the middle of the rush, I spotted a table where two women were sitting across from each other, leaving half the table empty. I walked over and was just about to put my tray down when one of them said, “Oh, someone is sitting here.”

I looked at her and asked, “Both of these seats?”

She said yes.

My brain did a quick scan of the situation. The pattern was obvious. Everyone has seen some version of this before: someone wants the benefit of a public space before they actually need it, so they try to reserve it in advance and make everyone else deal with the inconvenience.

That was clearly what was happening here. Two people were trying to hold a four-seat table. I did not feel like indulging it.

So I calmly put my tray down and said, “Then you can go find another table later,” and sat down to eat.

They did not say anything else.

A few minutes later, one more person came over and took a seat. But there was never a fourth person. In other words, they were really trying to keep an entire table for three people, and had casually claimed there were four. They just happened to run into someone who was not willing to play along.

The same thing happens with parking spaces

I have seen plenty of videos online of people trying all kinds of tricks to save parking spots. The reaction is usually the same: everyone hates it.

And when someone refuses to let the scheme work—when they move the person aside and park properly in the space instead—the comments are full of applause.

That says a lot. Most people dislike this habit of staking a claim on public resources before the person is even there to use them. If nobody pushes back, the people who do it will keep doing it. In the moment, a lot of bystanders may decide it is not worth the trouble, but there are always a few who will not let it slide.

I used to run into this constantly in college

Back in university, seat-saving in classrooms and libraries was extremely common, and sometimes I dealt with it directly.

Some people were absurd about it. One person from a dorm would show up early and save seats for the whole group. If class started at 7 p.m., someone might arrive at 6 with a stack of books—three, five, sometimes even more—and place one book on each desk to claim a seat.

Then it would spread. Other people would copy the same move. Sometimes the saved seats would take up more than half the room.

So you could walk into a classroom at 6:30, barely see any actual students, and yet dozens of seats were already “occupied” by books.

When I ran into that, I would quietly collect the books one by one and stack them inside the lectern at the front. Then, as students came in, they would fill the seats that had previously been blocked off.

Eventually the last people to arrive would be the ones who thought they had reserved seats and could afford to show up late. They would walk in looking confused, then reluctantly go look for whatever seats were left—the ones they had been trying to avoid in the first place.

Even the office break room is not spared

The same thing happens at work.

In the company pantry, people who order takeout usually eat there. At lunchtime there are fewer than twenty seats, so it can get crowded and some people have to wait for the first wave to finish.

But even there, some people try to reserve spots ahead of time.

One time I walked in and saw five or six of the best seats taken not by people, but by little bags, water bottles, and similar items. Most of the remaining places were already occupied.

So again, I did not make a fuss. I simply moved the bottles and bags into a pile off to the side, picked a seat, and sat down.

Very quickly, those spots were all filled by actual people. A while later, the ones who had tried to save them showed up looking genuinely surprised, but there was nothing they could do except wait.

It is a small thing, but it makes shared spaces worse

People save seats everywhere.

What bothers me is not just the act itself, but how casually some people treat public space as something they can pre-claim for convenience. A cafeteria seat, a library desk, a classroom chair, a break room spot, even a parking space—these are all shared resources. First come, first served is a pretty good rule.

I do not expect this behavior to disappear, but I also do not think people who do it should succeed every single time. A little more consideration for others would make ordinary shared spaces much less irritating.