Friday, May 29, 2009

Scene (and question) from a train

For those of you who know the daily joy of regional rail, a quick question.

You board a Friday afternoon rush hour train for a 40-minute trip. The AC is off, and the car is 80% filled. The train is late, and your mood is not great.

You pass by a white male in a blue striped polo shirt and aviator sunglasses who is taking up two seats up curling up in the fetal position to snooze.

On the other end of the car, a black woman is having an energetic conversation on her cell phone about the failure of the person on the other end to arrive in Newark on time with a baby for transfer. This conversation lasts several minutes,and can be heard clearly for several cars, such is her volume.

Do you:

1) Tell the white guy to move over so you can sit next to him, just for malicious spark of ruining his nappy time,

2) Inform the black woman that, if the baby looks and acts anything like her, she's better off flying solo, especially since that might mean she could STFU,

3) Admire the white guy's stick it to the man attitude, especially since the train conductor isn't calling him on it either, and think about pulling it off yourself on some future trip,

4) Crank up the headphones so you can ignore the black woman and not be one of the pissy passive-aggressive people who are telling her to shut up, albeit not to to her face or in a way that she even actually hears, or

5) Write about the whole mess on your wildly unpopular blog to distract yourself from the lack of AC, and to kill most of the trip time with the writing, image find, editing and posting.

I'll leave it to the reader to guess which way I went...

1 comment:

The Truth said...

Make sure to crank out a quick obit before attempting #2.