According to your ass, so shall it be unto you

It was in the early days of my shuttling around Lagos via public transport. Before then, I hardly had the need to go anywhere where my mum's car wouldn't be able to convey me to since I was in the secondary school boarding house for most of the year. However, upon graduation from high school, things changed and I had to, however unwillingly, take up responsibility for the majority of my life and let mum have some rest.

I'd been in a danfo (Lagos public transport) bus going from some point A to a quite distant point B. Not an unusual situation, I happened to be sharing a seat of four with at least, one fat-ass person. If you don't know the implication of that, lemme give you a hint: the fat-ass person (most probably a woman) takes up sitting space of between 1.5 and 2 normal-sized people. That leaves the remaining three of you barely having space to put your ass down in the bus. God help you if there's another fat ass person on the same seat. Anyway, I accepted my fate and took it as just another day in Lagos metropolis.


I'd not quite adapted to this rather inconvenient situation and my idle mind wandered; at least, that would distract me from the situation around me. I started to imagine what could be the lasting solution to this awful condition which we in-shape Lagosians often find ourselves in day-to-day. Then I got an idea; no, I got the idea.

The idea was quite simple: the fat-ass people would compensate their slim counterparts for the inconvenience; indirectly. The approach to implementing this would be technological in nature to facilitate accuracy of the system. All the seats would be fitted with some computerized ass-size measuring device. As each passenger takes its place on the seat, the device measures the width of the person's tush. On taking the four measurements (assuming the vehicle in question is a 4-seater), the device would then use the simple ratio method - which you learnt in primary school - to estimate the amount which each passenger would pay as fare with respect to the seating space they occupy.

Let's take an example:
I'm taking a campus shuttle from Yaba to UNILAG. The regular fare is N30 per head. That makes the charge per seat N120. So, let's assume the following:
1) the size of a seat is 2m;
2) the seat which I chose to sit on is a four-sitter;
3) I (Person A) occupy 0.35m of seating space;
4) Person B occupies 0.6m of seating space
5) Person C takes up 0.5m;
5) Person D occupies the rest (put your brain to work!)

From my calculations:
1) I should pay N21.0, let's scale it down to N20.
2) Person B should pay N36.0, let's scale it down to N35
3) Person C shoud pay exactly N30
3) Person D should pay N33, we shall scale it up to N35 as his ass size doesn't differ much from Person B's and someone has gotta pay for those scaling downs.

Now, isn't that some idea to kill for? Apparently, this idea, if successfully implemented, would see the end of the 'equal fare' regime - if you know what I mean. We non-overweight people would get subtle compensation for the discomfort we experience from day-to-day. Probably, fat people would also strive to lose some weight cause of the financial effect their body-size would be having on them. What about the overweight people who happen to be living in poverty?

***any ideas for a title, please, just add it as a comment. Thanks.