Plugged in, switched off, and out of jail

According to the BBC (here), the iPod might be responsible for making people antisocial. What with us all getting about locked in our own personal bubbles and switching off from the rest of the world. This is, quite naturally, complete drivel.

While it's true that you can't get on the tube these days without a cacophony of sound coming from cheap shitty Apple earphones being used by the fashion statement, rather than music fan, crowd. None of them have been made antisocial by it. What's made them antisocial is the realisation that those little white ear phones are essentially keeping them out of jail.

Have you even tried to take public transport? Between the number of people who think the entire carriage need to hear their phone conversation, kids too poor for headphones playing music no one asked for, women so perplexed by alarm clocks that they feel they're entitled to use a bus as their surrogate bathroom to make up for lost time, (I've even seen one woman clipping her nails and throwing the bits she hacked off her own body onto the floor) why the hell wouldn't anyone want to switch off from this filth?

If I sat down next to you at work and emptied the contents of my razor into your lap, you'd quite rightly punch me in the face. But apparently, do something similar on public transport, and it's just peachy.

If that's not enough of a reason, then think about the beggars and soap dodgers lying to you about needing money for a hostel, Chuggers trying to get you to sponsor their existence under the guise of saving a distraught unicorn, tourists who don't know how a map works, and, finally, street preachers who think their particular brand of cloud fairy has compelled them to piss off as many people as humanly possible under the firm believe that being insanely irritating is the key to the kind of mass conversations that would have made David Koresh feel impotent.

Quite frankly leaving the house in the morning is a bloody nightmare. Putting some earphones in and legitimately being able to ignore this never ending stream of window lickers is pretty much the only reason that London isn't synonymous with the kind of mass public executions that it so sorely needs.

So, if you're sitting there thinking someone listening to music means you feel you can't ask them for directions, then remember; if they weren't listening to them, and you asked them, you'd probably get shot.