Hi Scud.
Like Settie, I'd sympathise with your predicament too. You did give your best shot at being a good friend. You were wakeful. You'd felt misgivings, and decided to check them here.
Your, "Only one more to go," was only delivered after she had demonstrated signs of struggle and discomfort. Your comment was tied directly to 'person is in pain and near goal', and took the form of 'goal is close ... rest will be soon.' Settie's comment makes sense in that she Might have had a sense of such embarassment all the same. I wonder .... Scud, would you have said it differently if she were a skinny person with whom you'd been walking up the stairs, if she'd shown knee trauma?
Exploring further scenarios ... If, at the beginning of the forced climb, you'd looked at her and said 'Hey ... only TEN more flights to go', that would have left room for 'fattist' interpretation. If, at the beginning of the forced climb, you'd said. "Hi ... bugger, it sure looks like we've got to do a climb today!" You'd be in an interesting position. That kind of comradely grumbling is par for the course when colleages' workplace has malfunctioned. However, would you have been supposed to refrain from that in the event that your comrade was fat or otherwize obviously going to have a more difficult time of it than you?
My head spins, and I bet there is a Zen training manual which has a story : A Zen master and two students met a Fat Person on the stairs ...
I wonder how it would go.
