Funny the way it is.

Culture. Even public transport has it’s own culture. I’ve commuted by car or foot ever since I’ve had a need to commute. So now that I ride a train two hours every day, the public transport culture has been a real eye opener for me… because until now, I’ve been walking and driving with my eyes… closed?

Back when the earth was still cooling and I attended primary school, I rode the bus to and from school, (school = a place where every other child on earth who wasn’t scrawny and so pale he was transparent would go to endlessly taunt scrawny transparent kids). The bus hierarchy was simple. Cool kids down the back, below the radar in the middle and geeks, nerds, nannas and myself up the front. In fact I was so uncool, I was sometimes the hood ornament and spent the afternoon walk from the bus stop to home carefully removing nanna’s spitballs from the back of my head and thinking of all the comebacks I should have said at the time. Comebacks like, “that last spitball was a great one old woman… but now this is happening” and throw her bitter chalky skinned ass off the moving bus. And on that note, young bullies be warned. Choose your next victim wisely as he may just grow up to be 6’7” and over 100kg with a temper to rival that of a thousand over cooked Gordon Ramsays with an unyielding penchant for revenge whereby the punishment supersedes the crime by a universally epic margin. One poor chap has learnt that the hard way in 1999 and now his nose is still on his face but he has to do a handstand to smell something.

The earth has since cooled, the core stable, the mantle restless but restrained and the crust dormant and docile. And with that comes my transition to my thirties. My how the hierarchy has changed. Recently I’ve taken to riding in the very front carriage of the train, (toward the far end of the platform). Initially I did this to avoid the fat, wheezing, anti-punctual yet highly perspirant seat molesters who would turbo waddle onto the train just as the doors closed and sit right next to me. Now I realise there’s more than just the extra 40m walk keeping these poor soon to be dead burger king and queens away from me. Every day, without fail, I see the same business men and women sitting in exactly the same seats in the front carriage. This is their commute too. Week in, week out. And weak out. No messing about. The front carriage has an unspoken prerequisite for occupancy: Treat others with respect and dignity and accept nothing but the same in return. There is no bending of this mission statement. This is the front carriage culture (F.C.C.) and today I witnessed a series of delft moves to seamlessly eject a young man who was still operating under the bus backseat spitball guidelines. He entered the almost full carriage, loudly speaking into his mobile phone about how ‘wasted’ he got last night. To avoid the whole pot calling kettle black routine, may I make it clear I have no problem that he got wasted last night. It’s just the manner/volume in which he chose to communicate it given his surroundings. Conflicting with the F.C.C. and still on the phone, he approached several spare seats but each time, the seat was either occupied by a briefcase or a comment to the tune of, “my wife is sitting here”. Clearly she wasn’t sitting there. No-one was sitting there. But this punk didn’t dare put the lie on trial. It then dawned on me that I had unwittingly gained acceptance by the pride. Perhaps by the honourable way in which I conducted myself. Or more likely because no other lion was big enough to challenge. Either way, my commute is more often than not, free from the great unwashed.

Funny the way the hierarchy has shifted from the back of the bus to the front of the train. It also means I was actually cool back in my school days too. I was just ahead of my time. Fuck you Nan.