Overheard on Transit: 30 Days of Eavesdropping

Riding the bus, train, or metro isn’t exactly a communal experience but, unlike driving, isn’t a solitary one either. Even if you’re commuting alone, you’re never really alone.
Overheard conversations by one’s fellow passengers can be one of the mildly voyeuristic satisfactions of public transit. A snippet of conversation is a brief glimpse into another person’s life and a chance, like Alfred Hitchcock’s protagonist in Rear Window, to invent a backstory for that random fellow passenger based on a momentary exposure to him.
Here is a selection of dialogue fragments overheard during my last 30 days of mass-transit ridership. Some strange, some humorous, and some timely. In no particular order. Which is your favorite?
- Do you enjoy ambient music?
- I hate building codes. Most of them are obnoxious!
- I do not like the feeling of ice touching my lips.
- We’re rebels without a car, man.
- That’s so “meta” I don’t even know how to respond.
- Is it intellectually stimulating or is it just a bunch of liberal fluff?
- You have to be in a certain mood to watch a documentary.
- No one reads The Economist all the way through. No one!
- I usually enjoy statistical probability distributions.
- I wasn’t a bully, I was the anti-bully. I’d beat you up if you didn’t stop picking on people.
- Ugh, I can’t stand “escalefters.” Stand on the right, please!
- Hi! No, really, I mean that. Hi!
- Oh look, it’s a rarely-seen-in-the-wild 10-car train.
- I don’t want him, I just want his Chipotle.
- We are ALL Trayvon.
- Quit reading meaning into my words. They have no meaning.
- I don’t date white chicks after seeing that movie, what was it? The one where she boiled the bunny.
What have you heard on public transit that tickled you?