“When people talk about the rat race,” the Professor said to us last Monday, “this is the breed they have in mind. These are the rats.” Having made an epic journey across the city that same day, then into town and then home again, he had been reminded of some of the trials associated with commuting. The majority of his difficulties seemed to originate with the commuters themselves; or the “Weenies” as he knew them. Actually not all commuters are Weenies, but the lion’s share of them are. Weenies apparently make up eighty-five or ninety per cent of commuters. The remainder is divided roughly four to one, Norms over Crackpots, both of which the Professor seems quite at home with. “Crackpots always have manners,” he says. As he expained it to us once, the term Weenie derives from that sound, attitude and expression that a five or six year old child emits, ten or so seconds after it suddenly realises it very badly needs the toilet, and isn’t sure if movement itself won’t call forth the deluge.

“Do you know what they’re doing now?” he asked us, apparently outraged that things might have changed since he last had to suffer the indignity of such travel. “Now they stand in front of the door. When the train pulls into the station they clump around the doors, so that the weenies disembarking can’t get through the phalanx of weenies on the platform. The irrepressible force and the immoveable object, if you’ll excuse the dog-eared metaphor. Some of them enjoy—the wrong word I know—trying to predict at which point on the platform a door will come to rest.”

“They’ve always done that,” Maxwell said.

“They’re all destined for ulcers,” the Professor went on, ignoring Alec. “If, indeed, they’ve not already arrived.” Two Ducks, who often misses the Professor’s subtler efforts, laughed. The Professor favoured him with a cocked eybrow before continuing. “It’s amazing to me that they can keep themselves at that tremulous pitch for so long. Always halfway between fight or flight. They settle a little when the vehicle starts to move, of course, and it’s then they remind me most of cooped poultry. Clucking and rustling, and letting a few feathers fly every five minutes, when a fresh wave of turkeys clambers onboard; like they don’t see it every bloody morning.”

“Ah, you’re making them sound loveable,” Maxwell objected. He felt that after seventeen years of it, he knew a thing or two about the business of commuting. “What differentiates this group behaviour from anything even vaguely cuddly is that it is underscored by an ethical parsimony that is as virulent as it is toxic. They open their newspapers in your face, they clobber you with their bags as they go past, they blare their personal stereos and they over-eat so they’re too big for the seats. They will do almost anything but take account of their place within their surroundings, or their clumsy intrusions upon the personal space of others. They are perversely Garbo-esque. In the midst of an inescapable crowd they are determined to be alone.

“I witnessed a man fall out of his standing a few months back in the carriage of a train; a no warning dead faint. There were two initial reactions to his plight that I saw. The first, from the people immediately surrounding him, was ‘Christ, no.’ The second, from those out of effective range, was ‘Thank Christ.’ Both of these were followed by a third reaction, this time from everyone. It equated to ‘Christ; how long is this going to take?’ If you ever have a health emergency on public transport, you better pray it’s a noisy health emergency. If it doesn’t get above a certain volume, or physical dynamism, they’ll ignore it. They’ll have more important things they should be doing.

“The funny thing is that my experience of this behaviour occurs to and from locations that as far as I know are reasonably well served. What are they like where the service is poor? They must be carrying blades. Can we still call them Weenies when they’ve got knives? It’ll all seem positively luxurious, of course, against the quality of service we can expect if Tweedle Dee follows Tweedle Dum into privatising the transport system. At that stage it’ll be pistols at dawn. And of course we’ll end up like the Brits, buying the whole thing back again.”

The Professor nodded sententiously at Maxwell’s contribution, before addressing him directly and as an equal. “Have you noticed this business where they get out of their seats a stop before the one they want? Blocking the aisle in front of people who do actually want to get out. It’s a marvel of inconsideration. Then they go and mash themselves up against the door, like an enormous pack of greyhounds all crammed into the one trap.”

“You’ll find, Professor,” Maxwell said, “that this usually occurs where there’s a station with a large car park. They’re keen to get out to their vehicles as soon as possible, so they can avoid getting caught in a queue. I don’t know if you noticed but they actually sprint from carriage to car.”

I jumped in at that point to tell how the last time I was in Heuston Station I thought there was a bomb scare. I’d just walked through the big glass doors and found a multitude running toward me. I had to throw myself against a wall to avoid being trampled, and I found out a short time later that they were ensuring they made it onto the bus into town.
The Professor, suddenly pallid, looked from one to the other of us. “How is it we go on?” he asked us. “How do we do it?”