A funny sort of thing happened to me recently (you’ll see why it’s funny in a minute).
I was about to start my shift at work last night when, looking across the street, I saw two youngish men (20s-30s) grab an old homeless looking guy, throw him into the doorway of a hostel and start beating on him. “Holy hell,” I thought, “a fight just broke out” (yep, my wheels were turning pretty quickly last night). As I was realizing what was happening, another young guy ran up with a video camera and started filming everything (he appeared to be with the guys who were beating up the homeless looking fellow).
Instantly I went from surprised to angry. In fact, I was furious. I’d heard about the internet craze of filming homeless guys getting beat up (or paying homeless guys to beat each other up while being filmed) and that really makes my blood boil. So, I jumped into my workplace, grabbed a radio, told them that I might need them to call the cops, and ran back out. At first it looked like everything had broken up, but then the same thing happened — the two younger guys, followed by the cameraman, rushed the old guy and laid him out. Of course, by this time I had been able to assess those guys and had realised that they were actually pretty big and would have no problem kicking my ass. However, I was too angry to care.
I ran across the street yelling, “Hey! What’s going on here?” I was planning on grabbing the two younger guys from behind in order to try to pull them off of the old guy, but before I could do that two women with clipboards stepped in front of me: “No, hey, wait! We’re making a movie!” This threw me off for a second. “Oh,” I said, “you mean those are actors?” (Now that I was closer I noticed that the punches being thrown weren’t actually doing any damage.) “Yeah,” one of the women responded, “you know, a movie.” “Oh,” I sort of stammered, “I thought these guys were filming themselves beating up a homeless fellow.” “No, no,” she replied, “no ‘bumfights’ here.” “Oh, um, that’s good,” I said, “because, um, that would have made me pretty angry.” Apparently they had already figured this out, so I decided to bow out, stick my tail between my legs, and slink back to work.