Sometimes they don’t realise they’re making a racket. A gentle reminder is much more human than angrily putting up with it
For years I’ve fumed silently at loud phone conversations on buses. I have planned horrible eviscerations, shopped online for signal jammers, and made jokes to my companion about there being nobody on the other end of the phone. I’ve tormented myself, reading the same sentence in my book over and over – most of the time not distracted by the noise itself, but by my frustrated rage. Then one day, not long ago, the penny dropped. A woman on the top deck of the bus was yelling into her phone. Her boss was an idiot and she’d had it out with him, she explained to her friend. “I told him that it wasn’t on and he didn’t know where to put himself,” she said. “I just looked at him and he backed right off.”
On the other side of the aisle, I went through my normal routine of rewriting the story in my head. “You mean he told you to do unpaid overtime and you said: ‘Ooh, thank you – how much?’” I grumbled silently. I sent a couple of death rays into the back of her head. They had no effect, as usual. The woman was settled, oblivious. The conversation was clearly going to last a long time, and even if I moved to the back of the bus it would still be audible. I was in hell, and I didn’t have any automatic weapons or an iPod on me. And then the fog cleared.
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