To be fair (we all heard his entire life story on this journey) he did genuinely need someone to listen to him - one of those times when you can feel both irritated by someone (he made me lose concentration and mess up my Killer Sudoku!!) and sorry for them. But now we're into how to sort out the mental wellbeing issues around existential crises associated with the isolation inherent in western industrialised society - a bit deep for this forum! It's hard enough just remembering how to calculate the capacitance that gives 1.5mA leakage at 230V (different thread) without solving that one as well...


But I'm a great believer that the more that people chat the more they learn how to do it - including when to shut up and when to keep it down *. So I'm still up for more chatting - including listening - on trains. Doesn't work on forums of course, because you can't see people edging away from you! Now that would be a really useful feature for forum designers to build in.


But it needs to be subtler than just telling people that some carriages are chat carriages - that'll just make people self conscious. Like those gatherings where you're told to shake hands with (or, worse, hug) the people either side of you, I hate those. On another train journey at the weekend someone rushed in with a dog - that worked really well to get people chatting!


Cheers,


Andy


* Although some of us (embarrassed cough) need our wives to help point this out to us after we've had a pint or two...if anyone's wondering why they very very rarely see me drink at IET events that's one of the reasons why...