I really thought I’d be able to allow this topic to pass me by. I thought I could resist. I was sure that I had avoided falling foul of the most obvious column fodder since Sandycove tried to ban dry robes, but my public transport rage has once again taken me over, Hulk-like. I’m referring of course to our transport providers’ promises to clamp down on phone racket on carriages and buses.
It’s been less than a month since Irish Rail got out the pointer stick to remind the commuting public of its etiquette guidelines, directing them in particular to the request to “use earphones and keep the volume low”.
I’m not a rail user, typically, and even though this is a subject that causes my wisdom teeth to flare up, I left it alone. Then Dublin Bus got involved. As a regular patron of the service the persistence of people playing music, video or phone calls out loud on the bus has me this close to donning a shirt and tie and going full Michael Douglas in Falling Down.
Last week it was announced that Dublin Bus and the National Transport Authority were planning to “strengthen” an educational campaign around the issue on its vehicles. Yes, but who’s going to make them? I grumbled, not unlike Gollum monologuing to himself about hating hobbitses, except the hobbitses in this case is anyone whose phone bleats out noise. I’m the other extreme. My phone is completely silent. If it so much as dings, my fight or flight response is to hurl it out the nearest window and hope a passing 18-wheeler thunders over it.
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The answer to a lot of the questions about society’s behavioural ills these days is “it was the pandemic”. Why is every driver so terrible and impatient and determined to break red lights? The pandemic. Why do people talk in the cinema? The pandemic. Incidentally, one would have hoped that the practice of coughing into your elbow or a tissue might have carried over too, but if there’s anything the phone cacophonists like more than sharing their TikTok feed with the entire bus, it’s open mouth hacking and spluttering.
Yes, I can see how pandemic phone and screen use might have fostered comfort in using devices differently and talking to people on loudspeaker. I use loudspeaker for calls myself – in the privacy of my own home. The very idea that I might fire up a phone call on a bus and put the whole thing on blast for the entire top deck to hear makes me want to shrivel up and drop off the planet. Ditto watching Instagram Reels or TikToks or anything else.
And it’s not just the bus and train either. I was waiting for a medical appointment a few months back and a woman I’d place in her late 60s merrily played Facebook videos out loud for the duration of her wait. On a flight earlier in the summer, the child across the way was set up with their iPad to watch some distracting cartoons with no headphones. Bluey or whoever was just blaring out like it was the most natural thing in the world. Luckily this was pre-safety demonstration, so the cabin crew asked the parent to turn it off, otherwise they were in for some passive-aggressive sighing and stink-eye from me.
“Why don’t you say something when these things happen?”, I hear you ask. Indeed. Why didn’t I? Isn’t it obvious? I prefer to seethe in silence than risk any sort of confrontation. I’m only human.
So what solutions are available then? The education campaigns hold little water, in my opinion. Don’t get me started about the backpacks on the Luas again. Maybe it’s time to bring back public shaming? Hang some bells around necks? Although that would just add to the racket.
A woman went viral recently with a novel way of shaming. When a man at a restaurant table next to her began playing a video without headphones she politely asked if she could watch too and made to move to sit beside him. He was confused and then mortified. Is this what we need to do on the bus? Join in on the loudspeaker conversations? Ask how the mother is? Start watching over people’s shoulders? Sing along? Or maybe we need to start campaigning for quiet buses, just like quiet train carriages. The only sound to be heard will be the crackling of the on-board vapes, because we are never getting rid of those.
