The underground ordeal is just about to go down the tube
Just when I thought people had learnt to stop booming “I’m on the train!”, I hear that passengers on the Tube will soon be able to shout into their mobile phones underground, too.
They’re having a laugh, aren’t they? The Transport for London bosses, that is. In my experience, people given to using phones in confined spaces tend to be on the less giggly end of the personality spectrum.
It’s oppressive enough when you’re in coach G on the East Coast Line, but in a packed Underground carriage where rats-in-a-box-scrambling-forresources rudeness is taken as read, I shudder to think of the
medical emergencies (which is to say my husband begging me to record Holby City in exchange for bringing home wine and Doritos), there are no conversations that can’t reasonably wait half a dozen Tube stops.
When it comes to having a blazing row on the phone – the effing and jeffing sort – an enforced caesura as you catch the Tube from, say, Waterloo to Tottenham Court Road, can be just the ticket to calm things down.
Not any more. Once there’s a mobile signal on the Northern Line, an already overheated Tube will be simmering with even more ill-temper and aggro than usual. Hades with surround sound.
More alarming still, to drown out the tirade brigade, ordinary “can-you-please-fetch-the-drycleaning?” exchanges will have to get louder. And louder. Until our ears bleed.
Imagine it; 152 aerated people in one carriage, yelling banalities down their smartphones like an insane, avant-garde Greek Chorus.
Actually, make that 151, because I’m off to catch the bus.