Today's Strategies

The best way to prevent cell phone chatter from intruding upon your commute is to avoid it from happening altogether. With this in mind, I present the latest strategies for preventing chatty people from sitting next to you during your commute:

1. The Psoriaser - You never get a second chance to make a first impression, so why blow it and lose the opportunity to unleash a blizzard of dandruff on your neighbor? First, wear black clothing. Then, just as the train comes to a halt at each station, start scratching your scalp furiously. Your solitude is guaranteed.

2. The Preemptive Strike - Nobody likes a cell phone chatterbox, including cell phone chatterboxes. This only makes sense since they can't hear themselves thinking out loud when someone is doing that already. So next time you see someone boarding the train while chatting on a cell phone, quickly whip yours out and start yacking away. Chances are, they'll do their chatting elsewhere.

3. Germ Warfare - Coughing fits, wheezing, sneezing... all of these send out a signal far stronger than the ones emitted by cell phone towers.

4. The Galloping Gourmand - One of the unwritten rules of traveling on Metro North is that only certain types of food are allowed — foods under 10 decibels. The moment you start to audibly masticate on anything is the moment you irritate everyone around you. For this reason, I would only advise deploying this strategy when confronted with an actual cell phone transgression.

5. The Frottageur - Metro North isn't the subway, but that doesn't mean you can't invade other people's personal space. This is a strategy told to me by a friend who described it as a form of brinksmanship. Someone sits next to you while chatting on a cell phone and ends up physically rubbing elbows with you. It's assumed that you'll back down and shrink from being touched, but instead, you do just the opposite and just sit there, flesh against flesh. I've never tried this, but I've got to think it would be effective.

The 8:44 to Hell

Yesterday, I'm fairly certain I sat next to a pregnant woman on the Harlem line of Metro North whose fetus was on a cell phone. Okay, I'm exaggerating, but only a little. My commuting experience an hour north of the City every day has given me new insight into life. This is no ordinary commute. I'm pretty certain that it's a microcosm that pretty much sums up exactly how each individual on the train will travel through life itself. Some will chat away, talking about business in a self-important way that's completely oblivious to everyone around them. Some will loudly gossip on the phone without it ever occurring to them how embarrassing, vapid and even graphic their conversation is to people around them. Some will spend the time ingesting the smelliest, foulest food imaginable. Some will snooze away oblivious to it all. And some will just sit there, wince from time to time, and just take it. I guess I fall into the last camp, but this blog is my way of sharing this weird ride so many of us take twice a day. Yes, it'll probably amount to venting most of the time, but it will also be observations about how ex-City people interact when they're back living on top of each other, if only for two hours a day.