This morning I was riding the New Jersey Transit train into Newark. The train car was quiet, except for a woman sitting four rows in front of me who seemed to be leading a business meeting via her cellphone. Four rows in front of me, and I could hear every word clearly. She just kept on talking. The woman would not shut up.
I couldn’t read, I couldn’t doze, I couldn’t drown her out by listening to music on my iPod except by playing something consistently loud, which would defeat the purpose.
After about 15 minutes of her yammering, I decided to move to a different car. I was going to just walk past her to the next car without saying anything, but for some reason I just couldn’t help it. I stopped at her seat, turned around and looked at her, and said, “I can hear you from four rows behind you, by the way.” She grimaced but avoided looking at me. “Stop shouting,” I said as I continued walking to the next car.
I don’t like being dickish to people. Usually I can keep my mouth shut. But I must have been in a bad mood this morning. And people who bleat away on their cellphones on NJ Transit are my number one commuting annoyance.
Why is it more annoying to listen to one half of a shouted cellphone conversation than to listen to two loud people having a conversation? Maybe it’s because when you hear two people, there’s a conversational rhythm that your brain easily gets used to, but when you hear only half a conversation, there’s no rhythm — just erratic bursts of sound interrupted by moments of silence, and your brain keeps having to tune in and out. Also, listening to half a conversation is unnatural, and I think our brains don’t like the fact that half the information is missing. The brain starts trying to fill in the missing information, which distracts you from whatever you’re trying to do. A conversation is like music; imagine muting the sound at irregular intervals for random durations. The brain doesn’t like it.
Either that or I’m just very hypersensitive to noise.
“Either that or I’m just very hypersensitive to noise.”
Or New Jersey accents?!
I wouldn’t complain so much about being forced to hear half a conversation. Where I work many meetings are “virtual.” So people in adjacent cubicles put their meetings on speakerphones. When I’m forced to listen to both sides of a conversation, or to someone else’s squawky-talkie meeting, it’s impossible to get anything done. An iPod is useless unless turned up too loud. The only viable option is earplugs, which makes answering my own phone calls unduly difficult.
So don’t complain about people on cellphones. Just think of the man who complains constantly about having no shoes… until he meets a man who has no feet.