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2014-10-16 08:47:25
Oct 15th 2014, 16:50 by B.R.
EARLIER this week, Gulliver was musing about how smartphones and other mobile
devices have made long-haul travel a more bearable experience. But their
invention is by no means all a blessing. A survey by Expedia, an online travel
firm, asked around 8,500 travellers what annoyed them most about others' mobile
habits. What people find most egregious of all, it suggests, is someone making
a call on his speakerphone.
Just the image of this had my temperature rising. It is, without doubt, one of
the rudest things a fellow passenger can do. What level of self-unawareness
must it take to make you believe that everyone around you is interested in your
mundane conversation? Then I stopped and thought for a moment. I tried to
remember if I had ever come across anybody who had actually done this. No
instance came to mind.
Maybe I have been lucky. Or maybe I am representative. If I am the latter, does
this mean that we all now travel so pre-loaded with angst about our fellow
passengers that we believe the speakerphone stunt is exactly the sort of thing
that goes on all the time?
There is a common predisposition among humans to believe the world is getting
worse, regardless of whether or not it is. Ask people in Britain if the country
has become a more dangerous place in the past decade and most people will tell
you that it has, even though crime is at its lowest since 1981. Could something
similar be happening with travelling? There is not, as far as I know, a
standard way with which to measure levels of etiquette, but is it possible that
we are all actually a bit more considerate than in the past? And that what has
changed is that we have become more irritable with those who step over the line
and more likely to share our frustration on social media?
What is undoubtedly different is that we have invented new ways to annoy
people. Another thing that gets on people s wick, according to Expedia, is
people playing music through their phone's speakers. This I have come across,
although more often on the top deck of a London bus than on a plane. (What is
most annoying is the quality of the music. There is an inverse correlation
between someone s musical taste and his desire to inflict it on fellow
passengers. Have these kids never heard of John Coltrane?) People watching
films or playing games without headphones also falls into this category.
I was once driven to distraction by a family on a long train journey across
Europe who allowed their children to watch hours of loud cartoons on a laptop,
sans headphones. At the time, I thought it was incredibly rude. I still do.
Yet, halfway into the journey the parents pulled out a fine picnic of cured
sausages, chilled white wine and other goodies, and offered to share it with my
wife and me. A couple of glasses in, it became clear that they were lovely
people, the sort of couple who would have been mortified to think we had spent
the previous two hours seething at them in a silent, rolling-eyed English way.
We all, it seems, have an ability to project the most negative traits onto our
fellow travellers, whose every faux pas we take as a personal slight. What is
more, we couple this with an assumption that we ourselves are reasonable
travelling companions. In fact, we are usually the last to discover which of
our habits get people in adjacent seats tweeting incredulously. The vast
majority of us, I suspect, would never be so crass as to take a call on our
speakerphone. But I would wager that plenty of us have spoken louder than we
thought while on our mobiles, or allowed a stray saxophone solo to seep from
our headphones. How would you ever know, unless you catch an English person
next to you rolling his eyes?