Silence is a dangerous game...

[venta]

Last night, wimble and I pottered down to London to see the second half of the His Dark Materials stage play (of which a proper review will be fothcoming when I have some time.)

The journey home raised a strange question of what kind of behaviour is acceptable on trains.

As the train waited in, then pulled out of, Paddington Wimble and I were chattering vaguely about some stuff he was working on. We continued to chatter vaguely about a range of things as the train trundled into the night.

A little before Didcot, a bloke sitting near turned to me half-turned his head towards me and growled "<.mumble>... had to put up with an hour of this already". The three other people sitting at his table laughed in an agreeing kind of way. Being a paranoid sort, I leapt to the conclusion that he was sick of hearing a conversation about database queries, Bourne shells and the like.

Now, I don't think that, if you're eavesdropping on someone else's conversation you really have the right to complain about the content. Anyway, I thought, he probably wasn't referring to us at all, I'm sure it's just paranoia on my part. Wimble and I continued to prattle about various things til the train reached Oxford.

By this time, us two and the table of four were the only people remaining in the carriage. As we stood up to wait for the doors to open, one of the other four said "Let's go this way [ie towards the other door], they're still talking".

"Can you believe it ?" replied another. "They're still talking."

They sounded actually quite pissed off about it, too.

Now, I don't believe we were talking particularly loudly. We were just chatting, normal volume, like you would do on the train to pass the time. Is this particularly unusual behaviour ? Being able to maintain a conversation, on a variety of topics, for around 70 minutes doesn't strike me as particularly arduous.

If I get on the tube - the bastion of silent travel - with someone, I chat to them. No one seems to take this as terribly amiss. Sometimes I talk to strangers on the tube, which scares them, but that's mostly why I do it.

And now I'm confused. I know I'm talkative. I'd actually regard that, mostly, as an asset. And I'd regard the other people on the train as rather rude and unreasonable. After the first remark, I paid vague attention to them, and they were making occasional remarks - certainly nothing like the sustained conversation we were pursuing.

In general, would you get annoyed by people near you on a train, or bus, or in a queue chatting ? Am I unintentionally pissing off thousands every day ?

Comments

[froglet.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a bunch of grumpy arseholes. If they wanted silence they could just have moved down the train.

Bar shouting (which I can't imagine you were doing anyway) the only time people could reasonably get pissed off with talking is say a 1-2 am train/plane when they're trying to get some sleep. I hate it when I'm trying to sleep on an overnight plane journey and people are having loud conversations, but yeah, you're not a particularly loud sort.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, to be fair it was the 2300 out of Paddington, so arrived in Oxford just after midnight. Maybe they wanted an early night :)

[wimble.livejournal.com]

If we were really being sufficiently annoying, they could have at least asked us to stop, rather than grumbling.

In that kind of environment, I firmly believe in "put up or ask", rather than just grumbling privately. Usually, it's put up, which can be rather stressful, if the disturbance is (for example) screaming babies. But the mothers' are probably having a worse time.

[eostar.livejournal.com]

I agree whole heartedly.

But what struck me as really odd, was that they were still muttering when you went to get off the train. At that point they were n't having to "put up" with your conversation any longer. Weird.