Friday open thread: overheard on public transport

[dolorosa_12]

I had to catch the bus home after work on Tuesday, instead of my regular train, but this longer, more frustrating journey was made somewhat enjoyable by the conversation two teenage boys were having behind me. They began the trip updating their respective mothers over the phone that they were going to be late home (with many repeated 'love you Mum! Yeah, love you Mum!' and so on), then pivoted to the epic online sleuthing they had undertaken when one of their friends claimed to have a new girlfriend but only provided photographic evidence of this ('It was so easy! All I had to do was reverse image-search the photo and it was obvious he'd just taken photos of a random girl on Instagram and Pinterest!'), then pivoted to the sort of inane philosophising that teenagers think is deep ('Religion is obviously just a tool for social control ... all wars in history were started because of religion — apart from economic wars'), and finally, having exhausted all other lines of conversation, started talking about how much they loved cheese and just naming different types of cheese ('Halloumi!' 'Gouda!' 'Do you know you can make your own mozzarella?' and so on).

I found the whole thing kind of endearing, and it certainly provided entertainment over the course of the 50-minute bus ride.

I never use headphones in public spaces as I like to stay alert, so I have overheard the most ridiculous things over the years, including:

A woman updating one of her friends about a family member who had just been released from prison

A guy spending the entire hour-long train ride from Cambridge to London instructing his letting agent on how to make a legal case for evicting a tenant from his property

A guy spending the entire Cambridge-London train ride talking through various complex financial market trades he was making

A young guy explaining to his girlfriend (I was sitting across from them on one of those sets of four seats around a table) that his afternoon had involved a) stealing a car, b) being chased by police as he attempted to steal said car, c) crashing the car in the police car chase and getting injured, d) the police attempting to take him to the emergency department at the hospital but refusing to go ('The car owner decided not to press charges, so I said to the police that if they weren't arresting me I didn't want to go with them to hospital') — all at absolute top volume such that the entire crowded carriage could hear every single word

I have also overheard so many specialist doctors call up their colleagues and convey huge amounts of sensitive patient information over the phone, in the reception area of our library, seemingly oblivious to the fact that a person sitting at a reception desk is actually a human being with functioning ears.

I find it absolutely excruciating to talk over the phone in public — anything more than arranging meeting times/places or letting someone know I'm running late and I'll basically immediately tell the person that I'll call them back when I'm at home — so it's always mind-boggling to me the amount of highly personal stuff that some people feel comfortable discussing at top volume in crowded public transport.

So, my question for this week's open thread: what is the strangest thing you've ever overheard on public transport?

Comments

[author_by_night]

I have also overheard so many specialist doctors call up their colleagues and convey huge amounts of sensitive patient information over the phone, in the reception area of our library, seemingly oblivious to the fact that a person sitting at a reception desk is actually a human being with functioning ears.

Yikes. That's really not okay. (Also, why are you calling about serious work matters on a noisy train?)

A young guy explaining to his girlfriend (I was sitting across from them on one of those sets of four seats around a table) that his afternoon had involved a) stealing a car, b) being chased by police as he attempted to steal said car, c) crashing the car in the police car chase and getting injured, d) the police attempting to take him to the emergency department at the hospital but refusing to go ('The car owner decided not to press charges, so I said to the police that if they weren't arresting me I didn't want to go with them to hospital') — all at absolute top volume such that the entire crowded carriage could hear every single word


What was the girlfriend's reaction? Did she seem horrified or impressed? Or could you really tell?

I heard a group of women talking incredibly personal details about a friend of theirs, who for all they knew, I knew.

[dolorosa_12]

What was the girlfriend's reaction? Did she seem horrified or impressed? Or could you really tell?

She reacted as if this were just a regular normal Wednesday, which suggests to me that escapades like this were a fairly regular occurrence!

[yarnofariadne]

People have shockingly personal conversations out loud on public transportation. I've also heard the doctors' and also teachers' conversations full of sensitive information. Absolutely unreal behaviour.

I once spent the entire half hour metro ride home listening to this woman having a conversation I'm still not entirely sure I understood. It was hard to figure out who she might be talking to - she was talking at high volume about her disappointing sex life with her husband, going through her entire pros and cons list of leaving him (which included details of his STIs), deciding really it came down to the kids, and then she asked the person on the other end of the line when they were coming to pick up the kids. She brought up Christmas, and was debating what she should get the husband she was just pondering leaving. She asked if the person on the other end of the line would get him something and let her put her name on the card. Then she dropped the bomb that she knows the person her husband is cheating on her with - and this part of the conversation TRULY made no sense to me, I think she was maybe considering asking that person to go halvsies on a gift for her husband with her?! But then she said, "Well we're coming up to [station], gotta go. Love you, Mam." And James and I looked at each other like ?!!?!?!??!??

[dolorosa_12]

What a wild ride! That's a whole soap opera in one half-hour phone conversation, wow! My eyebrows were nearly raised right into my hairline by the time I got to the end!

[yarnofariadne]

The number of times James and I looked at each other with increasingly shocked faces during this metro ride was excessive!

[lilysea]

I was once on a bus in Canberra after work - between 5pm and 6:30pm -

and the young women behind me (I would say aged between 16 and 22) were discussing the boyfriend of one of them

Young woman #1 who had her VERY young baby with her: My boyfriend just got out of jail

Other young woman: What was in for?

Young woman #1: Grievous bodily harm

Young woman #2: Against a man or a woman?

Young woman #1: Against a man

Young woman #2, sounding completely relieved: Oh, that's alright then!

[dolorosa_12]

Oh wow! I feel as if I've overheard some very strange things on buses in Canberra (and also coaches to and from Canberra in various directions), but that takes the cake!

[lilysea]

Yeah, given that her baby was 6 months old tops, and very possibly younger, I really don't think

crying baby + man who just go out of jail for GBH is a good combination!

all too often, men get frustrated and shake babies

[corvidology]

I don't like phones in general, let alone having personal conversations on them in public so, yeah, no. A lot of my colleagues work in open spaces and I campaigned, successfully, for a tiny office that really couldn't be assigned to anyone (same rank, etc.) to be designated a private phone room with a VOP though most people take their mobile in there with them.

I overhear a lot of conversations - I inherited my mother's incredible hearing to go with my bad eyesight *g* - but the strangest conversations are inevitably the ones people have with me directly. I don't know what about me exactly screams "tell me the weird shit you're not telling anyone else" but there you go. The last time I was in the DMV renewing my driver's license a huge man came and sat next to me in the waiting room, literally taking up two of the plastic chairs by himself. He said good afternoon, I said good afternoon and then he told me he'd just been 'released from New York'and wanted to know if you could get a driver's license in the state I live in if you'd served time for manslaughter. I told him yes - I'd just read the entirety of the driver's license handbook online as this state likes to surprise retest you when you apply for your license renewal. Then he proceeded to ask me for restaurant, hardware store and gun club recommendations! I could help him with the first two. ;D

[adore]

OMG 😱 I would have Freaked. Out. Internally

The most endearing interaction I’ve had on public transport was when the little boy sitting behind me on the bus tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a strand of hair, explaining, “Your hair fell down.” He fully expected that I’d want it back and put it back on my head 😆💕

[vriddy]

The hair strand story is so cute :D

[nerakrose]

I’m terrible at intentional eavesdropping (it takes too much effort when my hearing is as bad as it is) so I usually tune other people out and on trains make an effort to get a seat in the silent car.

However, I think I have once been the person overheard - once several years ago when I was still a student, I was taking the metro in copenhagen (going where I don’t remember) when one of my sisters (who was very young at the time - she’s turning 30 this year but I think she was maybe 19 at the time) calls me to ask me what a specific job title means. I don’t know what it means. (I still don’t.) so I tell her, it’s a kind of academic job but I don’t really know what it means or what kind of tasks are associated with it, she should look it up. She keeps asking questions about it - could it be something to do with x or y or z? And I keep telling her, with increasing intensity, that I don’t know, google it, I really don’t know, the answer is I don’t know, I could speculate from here until the end of the world but I don’t know, try googling it?

And throughout this whole conversation until I decided to just end the call, I was VERY aware of people furtively listening in. Nobody was directly looking at me or making eyes at people they were with, they were just…so obviously listening while pretending they weren’t, lol.

[tellshannon815]

When I was coming home from university for the Easter break one year, by the end of the journey I practically knew the entire life story of the family sat behind me - it started with the father yelling "Don't call me Graham, he's your stepfather!" One child (who I thought was about 3) said "And you're our father?" to which he yelled "No, I am not your father, I am your daddy!" By the time I got off the train, I knew that mother had run off to Scotland with this Graham, that Daddy had them for the Easter holidays and he was starting to get angry with the children for talking in Scottish accents. (The children were playing on it a bit - when Daddy was telling them off, one of them said they'd get Graham to smack him on the bottom.) At one point, they started bugging some medical student from Aberdeen who they somehow thought was a policeman, and Daddy was begging him to play along.

(That was the day the Queen Mother died. For some reason, this family stuck in my head more than any of the news coverage of that.)

Another time on that same route, someone told her screaming toddler to "stop fucking swearing or I'll slap your fucking arse". I wonder where he picked that up from?

Someone in some kind of dispute with Habitat once seemed to think the entire train needed to hear her voicemail from their customer services.

[senmut]

I have actually said "that's protected health information and I heard both the name and date of birth" to a medical person in the wild. They freaked out and got off the phone, thankfully.

I don't do public transport at all now, but back when I was still flying, I got treated (sarcasm) to dude explaining how he kept his baby!mamas, all three of them, straight in his head.

[thatjustwontbreak]

This is such a fun open thread to read! Your teenagers story cracked me up.

[vriddy]

Those teenagers do sound endearing haha. I'll have to remember just talking about cheese/saying random cheese names whenever I run out of conversation topics, it's a good tip!

Maybe less nowadays, but for a while after moving abroad I seemed to hear people speaking in my native language on buses and talking about particularly sensitive topics on the expectations that no one else could understand (...well, that always was my assumption, but considering the stories you and other people shared perhaps some people really do not mind what they share in public spaces!! I'm like you in needing a private space if I'll use the phone at all.) Anyway, I was on a bus line with a university as a final stop, and one of the students was describing in great, worried details how her friends were setting her up to take the fall now that their weed stash (or something like that, which was clearly illegal at the time but not a very strong substance) had been discovered, when she'd been the one to store it for everyone because it was easier to hide in her room. Cue descriptions of discussions with the lawyers, which parts she'd lied about, what other stash hadn't been found yet, etc... It's a couple of decades ago now so I'm less worried about it myself, but she was revealing so much information and evidence during that entire bus trip!! Obviously I swore to myself never to assume no one else could understand whatever language I was speaking even when abroad. My family hasn't quite got the memo still and will freely comment on people's appearance or loudly wonder what they're doing when travelling, sometimes, because if they can't understand the local language then clearly no one can possibly understand theirs either. Argh!

[luzula]

A colleague of mine worked in Japan for a few years. He is a white man (Swedish) but had learned a fair amount of Japanese, and the funniest conversation he overheard was a group of elderly Japanese people who, clearly assuming he couldn't understand them, speculated about whether he was, or was not, a Neanderthal.

[merit]

I have my big over ear headphones to avoid some of the conversations inflicted on me on public transport ^^ I haven't had an issue with safety (yet I guess) though I am less likely to wear them walking home at night.

I don't tend to have a conversation on public transport either (bar your exceptions too).

Hmm, a girl reciting why she and her boyfriend had broken up to a friend (he deserved to be dumped).

[trepkos]

A guy in a Pikachu onesie singing to his chameleon. ETA: not on the phone - the chameleon was present, and had crawled up from under the onesie near his neck.