Very top five worst people to speak to on a train

I quite like taking the train, but I can’t seem to pass a train journey without someone sidling up to me and spilling their life story all over me a like a simmering cup of bitter coffee. And I didn’t even want coffee. I just wanted to do my crossword.

Maybe you too have a big friendly face, honest eyes and a smile permanently creasing your cheeks. If so, damn; people are going to assume that you’re always up for some jolly banter, the selfish bastards.

5. The Bores

Some people are starved of attention for a reason; because they are boring. These people are so hungry for a conversation (or: to speak at you for hours without stopping to breathe) that they will literally take any opportunity handed to them. Don’t smile at them, don’t make eye contact, don’t even look…! You looked!

“Hello,” They will say, in a disarmingly friendly and normal sounding way. It would be churlish not to acknowledge them, even with the most cursory nod. But by now it’s too late, and you’ll be sucked into their vortex of ennui-inducing chatter like a pube down a drain.

The narrow focus of their interest will also betray their status as a bore. It won’t just be “cars”. It will be “Saabs manufactured before 1989.” (That’s before General Motors bought Saab from Scania after the restructuring of Saab into an independent company during a time in the company’s history when … (I stopped making notes at this point as my fingers deliberately snapped the pen and tried to slit my throat with the sharp plastic shards)…)

The best way to deal with these people is to simply pop in your mp3 player and turn up the volume. They’ll probably just keep talking, either at you or else effortlessly slide the focus of their conversation to someone nearby.

4. The Crazies

When it comes to the most foul of the racists and bigots, you want to watch out for that harmless-looking old woman, squinting rheumily into her bag of boiled sweets and perched rheumatically on the edge of her seat.

If you sit next to her, she might call you “dear” and offer you a sweet. All will be smiles and chuckles, then suddenly her wrinkles will deepen into scowled trenches of disdain and her eyes will narrow crustily. Don’t even look at what she’s looking at, I can tell you that it will be either; a teenage mother; anyone who looks even slightly foreign (by any measure, whether it’s skin tone, choice of clothes, or general shiftiness); or a youth (who is doubtless ‘hanging around looking for trouble’).

Then suddenly it will turn out that Mrs. Old Lady has a whisper like a knife being enthusiastically steeled as she offers you the opportunity to concur with her that something ought to be done about this by someone. It’s a disgrace, she’ll conclude, as you radiate lack of agreement while not inciting her to further explanation by trying to look as neutral as possible.

Also, watch out for views that sound harmless. It might not sound like what you are agreeing to is intrinsically repulsive, such as “young people should take pride in their appearance.” But don’t look as if you agree quite yet, because then you’ll get swept up in her upcoming justification. For example, people say an awful lot of bad things about Adolf Eichmann, but at least his uniform was always spotless. Very neat man, good posture. We need more youths like that these days, taking a bit of pride in themselves.

That sort of thing.

3. The Flirts

When someone sultrily whispers; “Hi there, is this seat taken,” then if you were to shut your eyes and imagine what you’d like them to look like before actually looking then you would never be pleasantly surprised. For one thing, they tend to have more chins than you’d have anticipated.

It is usually quite nice to be flattered, but as they remark on how much they like your haircut, or your shirt, or your magnificent blue eyes, you cannot shake the mental picture of a farmer stroking a pig’s back to calm it down as his other hand reaches for the stun gun and knife.

Unlike the bores and the crazies, the flirts will ask you questions. Ceaselessly, in fact. About every damn topic they can think of. This is because they once read a book that said men love the feeling of importance they get when they are asked questions, but I always feel that since I know that they know that, the effect is rather spoiled. Also, if they know that I know that they know that, then it just feels like they are going through the motions like a horny automaton, going by the book time and time again in the hope of one day snaring someone as ugly and lonely as they are.

Good luck to them. The same book must also have said that perfume should be applied until you have reached saturation point for the fabric of your ghastly clothes, and that make-up should be applied with a grouting trowel.

2. The Woebegone

They sigh as they scale the slight step onto the train, hand shaking on the rail, and when they do sink slowly into a seat it looks remarkably like a sped up video of a decomposing body recorded in time lapse.

You might try to get on with your crossword puzzle, but your concentration will wither. There is something quite un-ignorable about a person who is making wheezing noises a few inches from your ear. Their damp cough is giving you concerns, and your brain’s internal thesaurus, normally rustling away on your morning crossword, feels suddenly overwhelmed by words like “contagion” and “infection” and “leaking”.

Sneak a look, and you’ll notice that above that shiny slimy nose are two haunted pools of ocular distress. Oops, you looked up, and now they will almost certainly try to engage you in conversation. Their opening gambit will inevitably be “How are you?”

Innocuous sounding, perhaps, but it is designed to illicit the easily given “fine.” This then gives them the liberty to tell you how they are feeling. And as you might have guessed, it’s not “fine.”

Boom, suddenly you’re getting hit with lurid details about the side-effects of their new prescription that wouldn’t sound out of place in one of those documentaries about wasting diseases in the 1800s. They seem to almost relish the description as they tell you that their doctor doesn’t know what to do with them, and that they’ve been though three bandages for their wound this week already. “It’s all the pus, you see, it’s soaks through quite quickly,” they’ll earnestly confide.

The best response is not to offer advice, but rather to say “uh-huh… yup… oh dear… uh-huh…” until either you need to get off the train or they finally die of whatever is making them cough so phlegmatically at the end of every tortuous sentence. (That same hacking pause is also your window of opportunity to vacate your seat, should you reach the former before the merciful latter embraces them.)

1. The Merry

“Woooooooo!” they’ll say, as they grin at you from about three inches away.

A modest volume of alcohol will worsen the traits of all of the people described above; the bore, the crazy, the flirt and the woebegone; as their inhibitions are lowered and they feel that they absolutely must tell you all about Saabs before 1989/ where foreigners can go/ how long it’s been since they indulged in physical carnality/ what the colour of their mucus signifies.

A larger volume of alcohol produces a new monster, more terrible than any that have gone before. This monster is one that primarily wants to be your best friend, but might also be sick on your shoes, divulge all of its personal secrets and start a fight with you, all in the same ten minutes.

They might have been drunk when they got on the train, or they might have bought their alcohol from the trolley; giving rise to the fantastically tautological statement; “I’m drinking to celebrate my discovery that they sell alcohol on trains,” reinforced by another “Woooooooo!”

Any attempt to ignore them and get on with your crossword will be rebuffed with “You don’t want to do that. Have a drink. Woooooooo!” and any attempt to listen to your mp3 player will be countered with “What are you listening to? You can have one earphone in and I’ll have the other, then we can both listen! Have a drink! Woooooooo!” and any attempt to gently coerce them into silence by dint of disinterest in anything they say or do will be rendered pointless with “You don’t say much, do you? But that’s ok, I’m the chatty one and you’re the silent one. That’s what makes us such a good match for each other. Woooooooo!”

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Then, one day, you might finally get some peace. There’s hardly anyone in the train carriage, and astonishingly no-one seems interested in talking to you. At long last, you get to do your crossword. But a few words later, and you’re bored. You look up. There is someone sitting across from you, and they aren’t doing anything except looking out of the window and smiling. As you open your mouth to speak, spare a minute to wonder; should I perhaps just leave them alone? Can random conversations with strangers lead to interesting discussions on topics of mutual interest, or friendships that would otherwise have slipped away forever, or even a wonderful romance that started in the middle of nowhere on the 1800 train to Edinburgh. So, should I say hello? Or should I just leave this person alone, looking out of the window?

If the person sitting across from you is me, then yes; you damn well should.

Top five ways to improve your next business presentation

“Presentations are the business of business.” Put that on your business cards, and everyone will see that you mean business. Or possibly buzzness, since buzzwords and buzzphrases should be at the top of your list of things to try to change your presentation from a time killer to a killer time. (buzzwords are important at every stage of your career.)

Anyway, ever do a presentation and feel the energy sapping from your colleagues and your strategic momentum just dry up? Of course you haven’t, because those phrases make no sense, but if you can learn how to turn the power of buzz to your advantage then soon your presentations will be helping you to “get” that “go” you need to be go getting with the best getters of go. Synergistically.

Making sense yet? Let’s check to see if your presentations currently have what it takes with a few questions:

During your presentations, are your colleagues currently characterised by their sleep ‘n’ lethargy? Soon they’ll characterised by their leapin’ energy.

Does your lack of content make you look facile and moronic? Streamline those same few facts into a concept-driven seminar which makes your selection of the essential gist look freestyle focu-centric.

Is your data so foreboding that you don’t know where to start? Chuck almost all of it away, and make a colour-coded flowchart.

Have I hyped this sufficiently? Then let’s kick off;

5. Use a pie chart

There are 360 degrees of reasons to use one of these Circles of Knowledge; too many to explain with mere prose, unfortunately. Explanation of the many reasons to use a pie chart cannot be done without (ironic) recourse to a pie chart. (Click to enlarge)

4. Power Suits

content is one thing, how you deliver it is another. You’ll agree that we’ve got content covered with pie charts (pie covers a multitude of sins) so now, how to deliver it with poise, energy, and massive shoulders?

That’s right, reach back into the 80s and kit yourself out with the finest in shoulder- elevating, waist-constricting tailoring that tapers from neck to toe like an elegant, pinstriped carrot of confidence.

3. Concept driven content

So it’s the night before the presentation, you’ve got your diagrams, you’re ironing your power suit, you think you might run through your talk and oh my god! You forgot to think of anything to say!

Calm down, or you’ll crease that exquisite suit. Having nothing to say is not a problem; in fact, it is exactly what you want.

Just think about your presentation from your colleagues’ perspective; they don’t want to be burdened with facts and words and blah blah blah and such; they want to leave that room feeling enervated, as if a contribution has been made, as if they have had their mind expanded. You can’t do that with facts.

If your presentation is a gold mine, then facts are the beams and concepts are the explosives, and you’ll admit that you can’t open a rich new seam with a beam. That’s just ridiculous. You’ll need some high grade conceptsplosives to blow that seam wide open. Hell yeah!

(You might equally argue that you can’t hold up the roof of a mine using explosives, but hey! let’s not over-consider the metaphor. Remember, if you have to think twice, it’s not worth thinking at all.) Alternatively, just blow the roof off for an open-cast mine of glinting concept.

Stick to concepts so that if anyone asks any difficult fact-based questions (So what were your sales figures? Did you produce any results whatsoever? Why do our accounts have an unaudited £100,000 hole in them?), just advise them to stop getting so bogged down in details, refer back to the grand concept and explain it again, as if they didn’t understand it the first time. They might persevere, but keep giving the same answer and they’ll give up eventually.

2. Audience interactivity

“What do you think?”

Ask this question to a colleague, suddenly, a few minutes into your presentation, and watch as all of the sphincter-meltingly intense concentration of everyone in the room re-focuses into the face of the hapless recipient of your so-simple sounding query. Oops, turns out they weren’t paying attention.

“Uhn, um, er,” they’ll gibber, as you patiently wait with absolutely no facial clues to what they should say as they literally shrivel up and die of embarrassment. Once they’ve managed a faltering sentence or two that vaguely suggests agreement with whatever you were just saying, thank them earnestly and continue as if nothing happened.

Now everyone is paying attention with the same level of adrenaline-pumped perfect memory for your next words as if you’d just shot their colleague in the chest. They don’t want to be the next fool to make a twonk of themselves by being caught daydreaming, and they'll remember what you said.

Be warned; don’t try this either on interns or on that chap from accounts who’s making notes. They are taking in every word you say, in the former case in the same way that a new sheet of fly paper catches every fly and in the latter case in the same way as a spider catches all the juiciest flies to quote back to you later at the meeting when you have to justify spending hundreds of pounds on “power suit expenses.”

1. Provide drinks and biscuits

“Oh, we have catering staff for that, it’s out of my control” you might say. “The biscuits are always terrible, but there’s nothing we can do,” you would chortle knowingly, before clapping me on the shoulder and getting your fucking arm broken for touching me as if I’m your friend or care about your patronising dismissal of my advice.

I know that the normal biscuits have a taste that makes your face do that twitchy-inward-sucky thing without you even meaning it to, and the coffee tastes like it’s been filtered through a cat rather than cafetiere, but I’m telling you to do something about it yourself.

For a little extra expense, your colleagues’ stupid little faces will light up with delight. “Ooh, nice biscuits!” they’ll cry joyfully. “They’re for us, right?” they’ll add worriedly, before falling on them like chocolate-deprived wolves at your slightest nod of assent.

With nice biscuits, it doesn’t even matter what you say. When they think of your presentation, they will remember bliss and happiness.

Promotion and a handy dismissal of those rather curious account gaps in your department will be yours before you can say, “yes, they were from Mark’s and Spencer’s. I agree, they do taste better than the normal ones, sir. Ha ha, good one sir, of course I’ll join you for golf this weekend.”

When they said no one ever made it to the top without getting their hands dirty, this is what they meant; crumbs under the fingernails.

No new article today, as I've been spending all my time fiddling with two of my existing articles for a competition which is being adjudicated today ( Very Top Five Horrific Stories Which Became Disney Films and Very Top Five Freaky Funguses). I’ll update this post to say how that’s gone.

Update: Mighty victory! I was 1st in the competition for Funguses. The judge didn't like the Disney films one (personal lack of preference for the subject matter, he said.)

The competiton was the Edinburgh Writers' Club Article competition.