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

[smiorgan.livejournal.com]

Different sorts of noise piss different people off in different ways. Need a sound engineer to properly comment, but I reckon voices tend to penetrate and are distracting because of recognisable signatures, frequency, and irregularity - compare that to the low frequency broadband noise of a train which is fairly constant and so easier to sleep through. I guess that's why people find loud walkmans on the tube annoying as well.

And different people can say the same things in different ways. A shrill voice, or bad grammar, or inane comments, or squealing girlies usually raise the red mist in me. But what's an acceptable volume level to one person may be just too much for another - and face it, the extroverts among us tend to talk louder, say more inane things, and are more willing to talk over one another in order to get their point across - all things which are anathema to the introverts. I think you're witnessing the classic personality clash between extrovert and introvert.

But given that you encountered a pack of people who all felt you were talking too much, my guess is that they were actually enjoying being put out by having to listen to your conversation, so they could grumble about it between themselves. Which is kind of perverse, and rude. I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.