‘This is such a Michael Scott story’: Woman tries to get ahead of inevitable cancelation when she asks a little person exactly the wrong question

In the beginning, there was nothing, and then a lightbulb went off in John Humanity’s head to the tune of “What if we put several billion people of thrice as many persuasions on the same giant rock, and tasked them with the mission of getting along with each other?” He patented this experiment, named it after himself, and then laughed and laughed every time we failed.

That brings us to today, where TikTok‘s @kayleethetoothfairy is attempting to get ahead of her own unintentional faux pas in hopes of keeping the record as straight as possible. Whatever comes next, a lesson will have been learned.

Over the course of the nearly three-minute video, Kaylee recounts one of her latest core memories, bestowed upon her by an airport and a person with dwarfism who appeared to be running late. They were struggling to keep up with the flow of pedestrian traffic in the terminal, and in that moment, Kaylee thought of how much she would like to be riding on someone’s suitcase through the terminal if she were in that position.

This — a likely amalgamation of sincere goodwill and inexperience with imagining the lived experiences of others — led her to walking up to this little person and asking them that very question. Kaylee mentions that she herself always wants to ride on people’s suitcases anyway, so what could possibly go wrong?

The little person got vehemently irritated with Kaylee, much to the surprise of nobody but our narrator, who was picturing a fun bonding moment between the two of them, and perhaps a verbal laceration of anybody who pointed and laughed at the two of them, complete with very specific jabs at this hypothetical bully’s receding hairline and cheating wife.

Some commenters latched right onto the Michael Scott energy of this story (“this is such a michael scott story“), but others were zeroed in on the moral debate at play; most believed Kaylee’s good intentions without necessarily letting her off the hook due to her naïveté here. Interestingly, one commenter, allegedly a little person themselves, said that they personally would have said yes in that situation.

This is to say that everyone has a different lived experience, and further differences exist within similar lived experiences (i.e. two people who come from the same marginalized group will have a different lived experience from someone who doesn’t belong to that group, but those two people might have differences within that shared lived experience). According to the Office of Human Services Policy, a “lived experience” is defined as “knowledge based on someone’s perspective, personal identities, and history, beyond their professional or educational experience.”

So even if Kaylee innocently asked this person of short stature if they wanted to ride on her suitcase, she would have been wise to consider that maybe this person was bullied a lot for having dwarfism (as many such folk are), and for all they knew, she was getting ready to laugh at them if they said yes, which prompted their response. Perhaps the aforementioned commenter doesn’t have that same wound (or maybe they do, and have a different relationship with it), but that doesn’t invalidate the wound that the little person in question might have, nor their response to Kaylee.

Anyway, none of this makes Kaylee a bad person, but if she’s worried enough about her image to post a video about this interaction, then she needs to start thinking more deeply about how people who aren’t like her experience the world. After all, she did post this in order to pre-empt the little person’s own, seemingly non-existent TikTok containing their side of the story, as though marginalized people have enough time in their day to document every single ignorant interaction they find themselves a part of.