The conductor just shrugged as the man screamed about ‘leveraging vulnerabilities,’ leaving me defenseless in the one place that was supposed to be silent.
Every morning, this suited jackass turned the quiet car into his personal boardroom.
A daily assault of loud calls and smug superiority.
My polite requests were dismissed, my expensive headphones were useless, and the rules printed on the wall were apparently meaningless.
But what he didn’t realize was that while he was broadcasting every unethical detail of his professional life for the world to hear, I was the only one taking notes, and I was about to use his own words to architect a silence he never saw coming.
The Daily Abrasive: The 7:42 Assault
The quiet car is a sanctuary. Or it’s supposed to be. For me, it’s an office, a forty-seven-minute bubble of forced productivity between the chaos of home and the polite pressure of the non-profit I work for. My laptop screen is filled with grant proposals, dense paragraphs of pleading prose that need to be perfect. One misplaced comma, one weak verb, and a hundred kids in after-school programs might lose their funding. No pressure.
The train lurches from the station, a familiar metallic groan. I sip my lukewarm coffee, the bitterness a welcome jolt. The car is a collage of silent concentration: a student with fluorescent highlighters, a woman knitting something impossibly complex, a man asleep with his mouth agape. A collective, unspoken pact.
Then he gets on at Scarsdale.
He’s a man in his late fifties, with a crisp suit that probably cost more than my monthly mortgage payment and a Bluetooth earpiece that seems surgically attached. He doesn’t look for a seat so much as he claims one, dropping a heavy leather briefcase with a thud that makes the sleeping man jump.
And then he begins. “Listen, Greg, I don’t pay you to think. I pay you to execute. Did you execute the Kensington play or not?”
His voice isn’t just loud. It’s a physical force, a sonic battering ram that shatters the fragile peace of the quiet car. It’s a brassy, confident baritone that assumes its own importance, that assumes everyone else is just background noise. I feel my shoulders tense, a familiar knot forming at the base of my neck.
He’s here. Again. The daily assault has begun.
The Polite Failure
It’s day three of the Kensington play. Whatever it is. Apparently, Greg did not, in fact, execute it correctly. The man—I’ve started thinking of him as The Broadcast—is pacing the aisle now, his voice ricocheting off the windows.
“No, no, that’s not an acceptable metric! We measure success in dollars, Greg, not in ‘positive feedback loops.’ What is this, a damn therapy session?”
My fingers freeze over the keyboard. The words on my screen blur into an indecipherable jumble. The kids’ literacy program feels a million miles away, lost in a fog of someone else’s corporate jargon. I look up. The knitter is staring at her yarn, her needles moving in a tense, staccato rhythm. The student has put on giant headphones, but I can see the muscle in his jaw working.
I’m a grant writer. I negotiate with foundations, I charm donors, I build consensus. I can do this.
I stand up, my heart doing a nervous little tap dance against my ribs. I walk over to him as he turns at the end of the car. “Excuse me,” I say, keeping my voice low and even. “This is the quiet car.”
He pulls the earpiece out, looking at me not with surprise, but with profound annoyance, as if I’m a fly that just landed on his steak. “I’m sorry?”
“This is the designated quiet car,” I repeat, gesturing to the little sign above the door. “People work and rest here. Could you possibly take your call in the vestibule?”
He gives a short, sharp laugh that has no humor in it. “This is a critical call. I’m closing a deal.” He pops the earpiece back in, turning his shoulder to me in a clear, brutal dismissal. “Greg, get me the numbers. Now.”
I stand there for a moment, invisible. Defeated. I walk back to my seat, the blood rushing in my ears, louder than his voice.
About the Author
