On The Train. Mar 10, 2005

I came down from my office just after 7 pm and walked at a comfortable pace to the station. At that time I was expecting fewer people would be on the train as I was thinking of using my laptop to write my daily ‘On The Train’ piece. The Seremban train came just as I was standing waiting at my usual favorite spot. It was 7.15pm then and there weren’t many people on board. I predicted that most of them would get down either at the KL or KL Sentral stations. I was wrong. What happened instead more commuters boarded at both stations. I abandoned my intention to boot up my laptop. I decided to continue to read. It was the reverse from the norm; more people came on board at every station. It was packed even up to Kajang. I stopped reading when we reached Serdang to start to write this piece. The best thing about riding in a packed train is that you get to observe a lot of interesting characters. A lady in front of me was sleeping as if she was tucked in her own bed. So comfortable and I predicted she was going all the way to Seremban. Soon after that, I was attracted by a loud conversation coming from the end of the coach. From the tone of the voice, it is obvious to me it came from a Chinese man talking to his handphone to somebody. Amazingly most people subconsciously would yell into their handset when they were in a noisy area. It is actually just our perception – a flawed misconception of time and space. I always laugh to myself whenever I overheard such a conversation. Sometimes it was so loud that make everyone smiling and snickering of annoyance. The thing is even if you speak in a normal tone your friend or caller at the other can hear you loud enough. In that environment, you only ‘think’ that they would not be able to hear you correctly. So you yell thinking people at the other end is in the same predicament as you. Try an earpiece or hands-free the next time