Quiet car discussions continued

Last month I wrote about Amtrak's Quiet Car (apparently it's a proper noun) and some of the  rules of social order discussions that have been popping up about noise levels and reprimanding violators. I've come across a couple other things since then.

In an article in The Atlantic, Andrea Bartoli at George Mason University's School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution provides an interesting take on the social structure of quiet car space:

"Fundamentally, the Quiet Car is a perfect microcosm, because you have all the elements of a primordial society," Bartoli says. "You're not in a family. You're not in a work environment where someone is more important. You don't have responsibility or power structure. You just have anonymous people sharing the space."

Bartoli's approach to dealing with offenders is to walk up to them and point to the Quiet Car sign, what he calls a "silent reminder." Apparently this works about two-thirds of the time. In the other one-third of instances, people respond in hostile ways and conductors or fellow passengers get involved. I suppose two out of three isn't that bad - though a seventy-five percent success rate isn't an unreasonable expectation for a conflict resolution expert (I think).

In discussing the quiet car violators, Ta-Nehisi Coates is less conciliatory in understanding people's behaviors:

These people are almost always dealt with by a conductor or other passengers. But I've never quite been able to figure out why they come to the Quiet Car. It's not a matter of not knowing the rules, so much as a matter of not caring. It's almost as if the offenders regard the regular cars as a public lavatory, and the Quiet Car as a private bathroom where they may repair to handle their shit.

He likens a cellphone conversation on the quiet car to a drunk person in a bar using racial epithet, which I found a bit much. I felt like he was mashing together two types of social interactions he hates, but that really are not analogous.

On a different (yet kind of related) topic, while I obviously don't think anyone should be using racial slurs or swearing at Coates' wife, I do have a soft spot for the life story folks he describes. Since I can strike up a conversation with pretty much anyone, I usually hear at least one life story a day. It's a habit that borders on a compulsion and I should probably curb the urge, but I've talked to some unexpectedly interesting people - an excommunicated Mormon, a troubled former child star, and a cat hoarder, for example. I'm fascinated by the everyday stories me as much as the more unusual ones - accounts of familial relations, parenthood, work, aging, and sickness. (Recently, a woman told me about losing seventy pounds after struggling with her weight for years and the ways in which her life has forever changed. It was very moving to hear.) In any case, I hang out in cafes a lot and not bars and so my people, if anything, are over-caffeinated. Maybe chatty drunk people are a whole different story.

(via The Atlantic)