Pet hates

I think I am becoming more tolerant as the years go by, but I would say that wouldn't I? Generally I would have said that the opposite is true, people become more irrascible as they age, but not me. These days I smile benevolently at things that previously would have irritated me no end, life is too short. But I do nonetheless have some pet hates. Even ones that are unrelated to dogs and dog owners.

The one which at the moment seems to jump out and annoy me more than ought to be the case is people using their phones on the morning commute. I don't mean sitting down in a train carriage looking at their phone, that is fine. What I mean is people walking along station platforms, up and down stairs, along pavements and crossing roads, all the while glued to their phones. And not just regular doom-scrolling or sending a WhatsApp. If they were doing that then they might be a tiny bit aware of their surroundings, but no, they are fully immersed. They are watching TV.

Watching TV as they walk along. What can be so captivating, so special, so addictive that you can't bear to be parted from it for even one minute? Well I have no idea, I don't really watch a lot of TV, but this is a scourge. And I am not talking a handful of people, I am talking about hundreds. And of course as they wander along, headphones on, eyes fixated on their tiny screens, they zone out completely. They become zombies, utterly unaware of what is around them, of fellow commuters. In particular, of me. And their pace. Slows. To. A. Crawl. This is what I hate most, the thing that above all irritates the bejeezus out of me. On a busy station, with everyone (except them) in a hurry, they simply drift along at a snails place, giving zero fucks about anyone or anything else. I get stuck behind these idiots every single day. Stairs are the worst. And it is a pandemic. Possibly not a national emergency pandemic, but a pandemic all the same. It should be banned, it's that simple. I'd install traps on platforms, holes in the ground that would open up with enough notice to give the average commuter a decent chance, but that would swallow up these inattentive TV-watching morons and send them down a shute, snakes and ladders style, to the station exit. Unless they were leaving the station anyway in which case the shute would take them back to the train, or into some kind of far away holding pen. There would need to be an Oystercard reader to work out which direction they were going in and then swoosh them the opposite way. Anyway, I can work out the details later, the point is that this should be an offence and carry some kind of fine or punishment, or at least result in some kind of inconvenience that might make them think twice next time. Grrrr.

I might have found a legitimate use for AI...