SXB
Sorry for delay, been away a day and a half.. on First Great Western, One Railway, and Flybe.
You asked
I travel in business class all the time and I wouldn't call myself "a self important w****r" What issues do you have ?
So do I, and perhaps I am one of those, perhaps not. It's not the class of travel which concerns me, it's people who use their mobiles continuously and loudly instructing their minions to do this or that, or who describe in excruciating detail their latest deals; it's always in "millions" etc etc etc. It's the impossibility of concentrating on somethings else while this is going on that winds me up.
Yesterday the quiet car was full..so one was condemned to the unquiet car. With 2 hours to go, a woman (late 40's) gets on, brisk with hard edges, Dame Edna glasses. She sits down, gets out her computer, spreads her papers all over a table for 4 (there was someone in each of the other 3 seats) , and then uses her mobile to go through a 50++ page document with whoever wrote it, with many criticisms of the language and punctuation on
every page, some of which were laughably absurd. She was being loud, rude and unpleasant to the other person, obviously her junior. She can be classed fairly, I believe, as a self-important velvet-tipper. This went on for at least 20 minutes while the carriage cleared around her, with some, including me, going into STD class to get some comparative peace and leaving her at it. She was very obviously a senior manager in a media group which I won't name although she told us, as well as letting us all know that the educational project she runs costs tens of millions, is for the benefit of 147,000 people, and that Nick and Pru, Fiona, Adam and Jeremy should get their fingers out.
She was utterly oblivious to the effect she was having, and indeed to the protests that several people made.
I really dread the onset of that sort of thing in Business on aircraft as well as trains. There's no escape in an aircraft.
If I suffer from uncontrolled rage, as I suppose I sometimes do, it's against people like her. Well, actually, it was controlled, now I think of it. I didn't say anything, or even shoot her as I would have liked. I didn't need to. There were angrier people than me telling her what they thought, as they left.