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transport

Peace and quiet on the bus

A mate of mine told me this funny story, which I posted to Twitter yesterday. Here’s a version with fewer emoji, and a bit more detail.

He was on a bus heading out to Doncaster.

Two young men got on, full of attitude.

They sat in the back, and started playing music through a Bluetooth speaker.

Music playing loudly in a confined public space is bad enough, but this music was of a genre perhaps best described as misogynistic profanity.

After a long day, this is not what you want on your evening bus ride.

So my mate decided to try something with his phone: he paired it to the young punks’ Bluetooth speaker, which seemed to have no passcode set.

And then he played some children’s music off his phone through it.🎵🎶

Bye bye terrible music, hello clappy joyous singing.

Cue confusion on the back seat, and amusement through the rest of the bus.

What if the speaker owners saw who was connected? My mate’s phone’s name was set to something generic – “Samsung”. All the same, he decided to lay low, put his earphones in and move his head around as if grooving to completely different music.

The two blokes got off the bus shortly afterwards, still puzzled, and my mate disconnected from their speaker.

And the bus rolled on in peace.🚌🤫👍

By Daniel Bowen

Transport blogger / campaigner and spokesperson for the Public Transport Users Association / professional geek.
Bunurong land, Melbourne, Australia.
Opinions on this blog are all mine.

10 replies on “Peace and quiet on the bus”

Agreed, nice story but doesn’t quite make sense. No BT speaker will pair with another device spontaneously if it’s already connected to one.

@jon

Perhaps the speakers support multipoint, odd as it may be in the case of this one, as it’s usually reserved for bluetooth headsets but it might have been cheaply manufactured.

CCTV cameras should record audio and anyone in the bus should be able to SMS the police. Yet another case where the victim would not want to talk on the phone to police but SMS the police quietly.

The Myki the criminals used to touch on in the bus is hopefully linked to their address.

This problem is the main reason I wouldn’t give 2 Bob for public transport.
You can have many enjoyable trips then some dumb mongrels make your trip a misery.
Who wants to be locked in with a bunch of ferals?

Everyone join in! “The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round…”

@Jacob: I doubt these people even have a myki card. I rarely ever see AOs on buses, which makes it even more likely that these people wouldn’t validate. I would only go as far as calling the police if they were harassing passengers, I would rather not be stuck for half an hour at Doncaster or in the emergency lane on the Eastern Carpark waiting for the cops.

How about banning mobile calls longer than 30 seconds on PT.
I don’t want to hear about people’s personal lives when I’m just trying to read my book!

And this is why (apart from motion sickness) I never catch the bus. On a train, you can move away from obnoxious people who make you feel uncomfortable. And if you can’t, you can get off and usually catch another train a few minutes later. No such luck on a bus.

I catch buses upwards of 100 times a year. Incidents such as these (or other ‘anti-social’) occurrences have maybe happened to me once or twice a year – and even then, nothing that a pair of earphones couldn’t resolve.

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