Where I express all my love, disguised as high quality hatred, for the United Headphone Rule.
Dear human being (and I’m using the term extremely generously),
yes, I’m talking to you. To you, sitting in the quiet carriage at seven forty-three on a Tuesday morning, blasting a video of some bloke screaming his bolognese recipe over a reggaeton beat at full volume. To you, who decided that the entire carriage should participate, without its consent, in a marathon of reels featuring strangers doing lip-sync to songs that not even the people who wrote them wanted to hear.
I’d like to understand you. I really would. I’d like to step inside that magnificent head of yours and pinpoint the exact moment in your life when you looked in the mirror and said: “You know what these forty exhausted strangers are missing? The soundtrack of my algorithmic preferences.” What childhood trauma, what black hole of upbringing, what synaptic short circuit convinced you that your phone was a sound system and carriage 4 of the express train was your living room?
Because you see, there’s a scale of incivility. At the bottom you’ve got the person who doesn’t give up their seat to the elderly. One step above, there’s the one who eats canned tuna on the train. But you, you who watch compilations of car crashes with the audio at full blast while the rest of the carriage is desperately trying to read, sleep, or simply not lose their mind, you are the final boss. You are the Sauron of bad manners. You are living proof that Darwin, every now and then, took a day off.
And let’s not even talk about those who do it on planes. Because if doing it on a train makes you a sociopath, doing it on a plane, where people are already trapped in a flying sardine tin at 36,000 feet, breathing the same recycled air, with their knees in their sternum and their neighbour’s elbow in their spleen… doing it there is a crime against humanity. It’s acoustic terrorism. If Dante were alive, he’d write a whole new circle of Hell just for this: the circle of the damned who watch cat videos on speaker aboard a Ryanair flight. And the eternal punishment would be listening to a 2003 Nokia ringtone for all eternity. At increasing volume.
The United Headphone Rule: A glimmer of light in the darkness
And that is why today, on my knees, tears in my eyes, heart swelling with gratitude, I want to pay tribute to United Airlines.
United has done something revolutionary, something so blindingly obvious and sacred that the fact nobody had done it before is, in itself, an indictment of the entire human species: they updated their rules to say that if you don’t put your headphones on, they’ll boot you off the plane (and I like to think this rule also applies while the plane is in the air). And potentially ban you from flying with them. Forever.
For. Ever.
I read and reread that sentence and I want to weep with joy. It’s as if someone had finally said to the screaming child in the restaurant: “No.” It’s as if Moses had come down from the mountain with an eleventh commandment: “Thou shalt not annoy thy neighbour with thy phone speaker.”
Think about it. United Airlines, an airline, meaning an industry whose customer service has historically been comparable to that of a 1970s Turkish prison, has decided to be the bastion of civilisation. And do you know the best part? If you forget your headphones, they’ll give you a pair for free. FOR FREE. They literally strip you of every excuse. It’s as if they’re saying: “Look, we know you’re a caveman, but we’re giving you one last chance to behave like a functioning member of society. Here are two earbuds. Use them, or get out.”
Some people say: “Isn’t it a bit over the top to kick someone off a plane for something like that?” No. No, it isn’t. You know what’s over the top? Forcing 200 people to listen to your personal growth podcast while they’re trying to survive a five-hour flight. THAT is over the top. That is violence. United isn’t overreacting. United is doing the job your parents clearly didn’t do.
A final note to the acoustic criminal
If you’re reading this and feeling called out, know that there is no redemption for you. Not in the immediate future. But there is hope: it costs five quid. That’s the price of a pair of headphones. Buy them. Shove them in your ears. And give back to the rest of the world the silence you stole, you miserable sack of walking incivility.
And to United Airlines: thank you. Not for the uncomfortable seats, not for the delays, not for that sad little roll you call a “complimentary snack.” But for this. For drawing a line in the sand and telling the world: this far, and no further. You are the lighthouse in the night. The light at the end of the tunnel. The last Jedi knight in a galaxy of boors.
May your policy spread like a benevolent virus to every airline, every train, every bus, every waiting room of every blessed hospital on the planet.
Amen.
And as usual, I leave it to the immense Hieronymus Bosch (I always turn to him because Dante’s punishments do not seem cruel enough to me) to devise a fitting punishment for those who impose on every traveler on a plane, bus, or train the forced listening of their dubious entertainment choices, such as the open-skull, anesthesia-free removal of the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens, carried out by the three village idiots.
To be continued…
The Rant is a column in which the author vents universal frustrations with surgical nastiness and zero remorse, distilling antipathy, rancour, misanthropy, and quality hatred. If you feel offended, you’re probably one of those people with the speaker on.
