Bystander Effect?

Picture this. Small event ongoing, guest of honour talking to room of forty or so people. Room is quiet and respectful.

One of the ladies in the front row has some kind of dry tickle in her throat or lungs / chokes on something and begins to cough. And hack. And cough and rasp, looking embarassed, holding up a tissue to her mouth, and does not recover in a short period of time. She decides to flee out of the room, coughing and hacking echoing back to our ears.

It gets louder, freed from the confines of politeness to the GOH, like she's coughing up a lung or a clot of dried blood. Then it gets quiet, like she's run away further from the room's vicinity or collapsed and fainted/died.

In the midst of all this, everyone keeps their seat and continues listening to the GOH talk. Including the organizers who know the lady more closely than I, and including my boss, who is usually big on customer service.

One or two minutes pass, turmoil rumbles through my mind, and I just cannot sit still any longer. I need to check on the lady - what if something's happened to her? Maybe I can get her a glass of warm water or something.

I jump up, edge around the quiet gathering, and check if there's a styrofoam cup in the water dispenser in the room. There's not. It's empty. Typical.

I exit the room anyway to check on the lady. She's not in sight, but wandering by the lift and toilets reveal the sound of desperate ugly hacking in the restroom. Oh dear. Well, at least she's not dead or fainted yet.

Feeling somewhat embarassed to just walk in and check on her (because she herself looked very embarassed at her coughing fit), I try and think of somewhere else to rustle up hot water and settle on going all the way up to the fourth floor to the offices, grab a styrofoam cup, fill it with 3/4 hot 1/4 cold water (I am a master mixer of lukewarm water, having done this for both my mum and myself when I'm miserable with ze flu), and carry it down the lift to stand outside the toilets, wondering "oh great, what now..."

I have sort of outsmarted myself because I have this obsessive hygiene thing going on and carrying drinkable water into a public toilet is not the first thing I'd do, and not the first thing I'd drink either if someone did that for me.

Maybe the lady has recovered and wandered back into the room, at which case I'd look a bit of a right fool hanging outside the toilet with a cup of water in my hand, but at least when I return to the room, I can look like I've kindly exited to get her a glass of water to offer her then.

Fortunately, while I'm standing around outside, with my ears perked up like an alert cat, listening for any further hints of respiratory distress emanating from the toilets, the lady exits, looking a touch more recovered, and I'm left looking like a golden haloed angel as I offer her the warm water like an SIA air stewardess and ask her if she's all right.

All's well that ends well. In the midst of her thanking me and drinking the water, the other two organizers finally came down to check on what had happened to her and saw me talking to the lady, situation well in hand. Which is the most timing-appropriate choice, of course.

Still, I didn't really do it for praise, or thanks, or even the afterglow of warm fuzzy feelings from doing the right thing. (Though sadly, my boss has apparently no clue to what I did, so I will continue to look like a disorganised, aloof, incompetent in her mind and on my yearly performance appraisals.) Nor can I refute that it's nice if other people know how nice I was, I'm only human.

I did it basically because I couldn't stand sitting there pretending not to notice that another human being was in some kind of distress.

And of course, because I was in control of that situation and I knew where to get help and things.

So I cannot point any fingers at most of the people in that room, because they were strangers to where they were and would not have known where to get a glass of water (though they could have perhaps checked to see if the lady had coughed a lung out), but I do have to scratch my head questioningly wondering why one other person did absolutely nothing, during and after. No names, but we have previously mentioned facades and false appearances before.

And lastly, I have to admit that I was familar to a certain extent with the lady in question, whom we have met before, so she wasn't a stranger and I felt comfortable enough to offer her some assistance.

Still, if the same event happened to a stranger, but who was also a guest whom I was supposed to be looking after, I'd like to think that I would have done the same thing.

Or maybe, if the person was not even a guest that I was supposed to be looking after - except that would be a little more dubious as I'd have to check a) that it wasn't a trick to knock me down and rob me b) that there might be other more closely-related family or proper hosts around, and c) I'd have to know where to get water, and I might not bother being so hospitable to someone who wasn't a guest...

... but I'd probably at least go up and ask if they were okay. And left after that if they indicated they were okay, in between hacking coughs.