Turns out, not everyone on my tram is out to infuriate me. Who knew?

Every day, with every tap of my myki, I prepare to make a new enemy. Sometimes it’s the backpack-wearers who think that because they can’t see the extra bulk behind them, it can’t knock me in the boob on my way to work. Other times, it’s a collective nemesis, the crowd on a tram after a footy game who think that because they’re crammed in so tight, they don’t need to hold on.

It takes the crunch of a sudden stop hurtling them across the floor to serve as a swift reminder that the rules of gravity didn’t exclude them personally. Credit: Robin Cowcher But most days, I brace myself for the noise. The Reels and TikTok videos watched at full volume, one after the other.



The FaceTime conversations I shouldn’t be privy to. The speakerphone users who need to go walkie-talkie mode while discussing dinner plans. No matter how high I turn my volume, how likely I am to end up in an otolaryngologist’s office in my efforts to drown them out, their audio assaults end up drowning out anything I choose to hear.

It makes me twitchy, irritated and un-fun. It turns me into a catastrophic cliche of a newspaper columnist using these precious print and online inches to wonder how we, as a society, got here. It reduces my temper down to nothing and means I assume the worst of everyone.

Loading Until, every now and then, one of them proves me wrong. On a plane a few months ago, I was sitting in the aisle and noticed the young girl in the window seat was angling her body to capture a picture of the sky outside on her phone. I’m not above a plane window photo; the window seat is my preferred spot and I go nuts for a tequila-sunrise-coloured sky (which, when writing it down, I realise is quite literally just the sunrise).

But this went on for several minutes – not long in the grand scheme of domestic air travel, but long enough for me to get judgmental about her inability to just appreciate a fleeting moment and let it pass. Not everything needs to be content, says I, the person who’s turned her life into, at various points, a column, non-fiction book and no fewer than four podcasts..