Conversational Dysentery

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Why sit in peaceful silence on a train when you can ruin everyone's journey with one telephone call?  Short informative calls such as 'my train is late' or 'I've left the cat in the oven' are hardly worthy of the title 'telephone call'.  Nothing less than 10 minutes of self-centred, loud drivel will do.  

It is best to avoid making these calls during the morning commute.  There will be too much competition from city gits trying to pretend they have an important job by calling a colleague and spouting cliches interspersed with their industry's vernacular.  Your call will get lost and, when it comes to irritating your fellow passengers, it's hard to compete with acronyms.  

Pick a daytime or evening train for maximum impact.  Whether you want a less populated train or a crowded evening train is a matter of personal choice.  With less passengers, you will have a smaller audience, but your voice will carry more so everyone in the carriage will hear you.  On a more crowded train you do get a bigger audience, but there is a chance that not everyone will be hanging on your every word, and your voice won't carry so far.  More people around you does also increase the chance that you may be physically assaulted by a passenger who can no longer take the crime against intelligibility that you are undoubtedly committing.  The ability to enrage your fellow passengers also definitely improves with age.  It is almost as if travellers expect teenagers to indulge in puerile conversation, but they will be far less tolerant of middle-aged callers, so the older you are, the quicker you will annoy everyone around you. 

During the call your topics of conversation are unlimited.  There is no aspect of your dull, witless life that is too trivial to be shared with your audience.  The hour you spent choosing an outfit for a friend's party - share it, and don't shy out of sharing it in a real time replay.  The interrupted sleep your had because your child had a bad dream, followed up with the time you spent before work wondering whether you should send the child to school or keep them home, needs relaying at length.  The conversation you had with your sister-in-law when your brother was out of the room which shows what a cow she is and how he really doesn't see it, requires a verbatim account to really do it justice.  Your tale about how your best friend's other friend is now really your secret best friend because your first best friend is actually a real bitch (which probably means she now has a new boyfriend and less time to listen to the minutiae that makes up your life) is a tale that has to be told.  What you and your friend think of your football team's latest signing - conversational gold.  Where you went last night should only be shared if you also include all the places you were thinking of going and all the reasons why you didn't, followed by an account of every alcoholic drink you and all your friends had and the effects it had on you.  

If you are worried that you won't have enough to say during the call, you could try a novel activity which other people have found to be useful during telephone calls, listening.  To do this successfully, you let the other person talk for a short while until something they have said reminds you of another crap detail of your dreary existence, then you jump in, talk over them and get the conversation back to you.  If this takes you a while, which it might when you first start making long telephone calls from trains, you can acknowledge what the other person is saying by repeating the same word over and over again in different tones and with different inflections.  For example 'No! (loudy and excited) ....... nooooo (disbelieving) .... no (laughing) ....... no (completely incredulous'.  

Don't be concerned that a long conversation needs a lot of words.  Nobody will think any the less of you for using filler words, train talking was made for filler words.  The most common ones are 'like', 'basically', 'literally' and 'actually'.  Working all these into one short sentence is very effective and adds extra emphasis to everything you say.  You can further enhance your turgid gibberish with filler phrases.  Again there are many in common usage if you are not up to creating your own - and the less imaginative you are, the quicker you reach the goal of annoying all other passengers.  The most common are 'know what I mean', 'you know', 'I'm not being funny right' and the timeless classics 'at the end of the day' or 'end of'.  It doesn't work so well if you use more than one of these phrases.  Your listeners will get the most out of your imparted wisdom if you stick to one and repeat it with alarming frequency.  The world record is currently held by a commuter on the 17.52 out of Cannon Street who in just one call used 'know what I mean?' 37 times.  Don't be fooled into thinking that as you have used a question you must await an answer.  Of course nobody knows what you mean. How could they when you are talking complete bollocks.  Remember that you are only using these terms to extend call times.  

By the time you are a few minutes into the call, you can judge how well you are performing by the looks on the faces of your fellow passengers.  If it is anything less than extreme irritation, you need to improve your performance.  Remember, no aspect of your day or week is too insignificant to be shared.  In comparison to the activities you are describing in that one call, an evening of acapella karaoke with Trappist monks will seem enticing.  Once you really get into your stride, you can have your fellow passengers rocking in their seats, with ears bleeding in pain, shrieking 'shut the f*ck up' within minutes.

The etiquette of how you address the person you are calling was set down years ago in the 'Manual for the Mindless'.  You are allowed to use the person's name only at the beginning of the call, after that you must use a cliched term of endearment.  It cannot be a nickname or a shortened version of the person's own name.  Common terms are 'bruv', 'babe' and 'hon'.  Again, don't fall into the trap of bringing anything idiosyncratic or unique to the call.  It's attraction is in its complete mind-numbing tedium.  

Ending the call is an art form.  If you take anything under three minutes to wind up the call, you've let yourself down, you've let the inventor of the mobile phone down, you've let the dull and the unimaginative down.  Start off by posting a teaser such as 'I'll call you later' or 'I've got to go now' to tease your audience.  When you feel that sufficient numbers of your fellow passengers have breathed sighs of desperately grateful relief, that is when you bring them crashing down with another thirty seconds of blathering, before your next 'ending the call' teaser.  Once you have done this at least four times, you may then say goodbye in a multitude of ways for at least thirty seconds before actually ending the call.   You will add an extra nuance to the irritation factor if you finish by saying 'see you in a bit' emphasising that you have just drilled your voice into your fellow passengers brains whilst calling someone you live with.  

It is very important that you plan your call according to your journey so that you are not cut off by a long tunnel or a stretch of low mobile phone coverage.  You are not going for mere verbal diarrhoea, nothing less than conversational dysentery will suffice.  If you find yourself still a long way from your destination with time and battery to spare, feel free to make another call to someone else.  The nearer it is in content to the first call, the better the impact.