Modern Etiquette #164 - bleeding ears

The buses in Edinburgh are pretty good. There's a decent amount of them and you know when the next one is coming. 60 years ago there used to be a problem with men in bowler hats and pipes playing 78's on old gramophones - the space they took up, not to mention the poor sound quality and racket. 30 years ago the 'Boom-Box' and 'Walkman' became equally annoying disturbances on a quiet journey and, with the advent of ear-plug headphones, I thought the syndrome of leaky music was over.

Mobile phone engineers have advanced their technologies to include a really bad quality speaker which is used by X-factor fans to listen to tinny, audio excrement while they travel on public transport.

I console myself in the fact that using these speakers drain the battery with great haste. I like to imagine these taste-deficient people finding themselves in a, perhaps not life threatening, but none-the-less very uncomfortable situation later in the day.

Not being able to resolve the problem in an efficient, twenty-first century manner and having no social skills or common sense, they will struggle through the challenge - probably mentally and physically exhausted.