Folks, do I have a sign on my back or something? Does it say, “please both bother me and disobey clearly posted signage” on my forehead? It seems like every time I ride the train I get stuck sitting by the bitch on rails who can’t keep her damn yap shut, and suffice it to say, I am less than thrilled about this cosmic phenomenon.
There is of course the obvious irritation of trying to decipher one Ruthie’s 30 page diatribes on how men have done her wrong while having some she-devil squawking about the synergies that she’s going to help create when she gets to whatever low-level strategy session (it’s always a strategy session) the fates have cruelly (for me) scheduled on this day. Although, even this I could abide if we were both left to our own devices on whatever train car we happened to board. But I, I planned ahead. I followed the rules. I knew I would want to sit in peace and quiet and listen to the sound of my brain cells atrophy while I leaf through the latest inTouch magazine. So I picked the one and only car that Amtrak has made available for just this purpose. I asked the station attendant which car this was. I made a b-line for it, knocking over 2 grandmothers and what I can only assume was a liver-transplant patient in order to choose my seat at one of those table dealies by the window so I could plug in my ipod whilst I travel. It so happens that my view from the seat I chose includes no fewer than four, four signs assuring me that I am indeed in the right place for people who have already had their glass of “shut the hell up” for the morning. But my antagonist, she took a different approach. She decided that signage was a waste of time. She could not be bothered to take advantage of her literacy for even the fraction of a second it would have taken to avoid giving me this ulcer. Alternatively, she did see the signs and decided that her synergies just could not be contained, by space, time, or human decency. She did, however, take the time to pick out a seat right across the aisle from mine with her gay (allegedly) traveling companion. Surely she must have read whatever bulletin has been going around telling people to come sit by me and demonstrate that selfishness is the new black, even though the four signs were too much trouble. So to summarize point one, disobeying rules designed to keep our society ordered and respectful makes me want to create synergies between my foot and your pooper.
But there’s selfishness and there’s selfishness, which brings us to point two.
When you are in anyplace that is otherwise quiet, and start talking, you make the choice for everyone else that it will no longer be a quiet place.
How self-involved and oblivious does a person have to be to think they should get to do this?
Evidently, as self-involved and oblivious as this synergy chick across the aisle.
If I were not so disgusted by her behavior, I’d have to stand back and marvel at the kind of mind that gets a person up in the morning, knowing that she will have to be selected out of the gene pool in order for us to have an ordered society.
In conclusion, if you are talking in a place that is designated as one that should be quiet, you are stopping the march of human progress and that makes you a terrible person.
