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By Mihar Dias November 2026
There is a special kind of man who believes the earpiece is a soundproof booth. Stick two buds in his ears and he is alone in the universe, free to conduct his divorce, his debt negotiations, and his emotional collapse before an audience of strangers who did not buy tickets.
I met one last week at a fancy golf club. Fancy, mind you. The sort of place with a dress code, a handicap system, and a members' lounge where people whisper "birdie" as if it were a confession. Into this temple of hushed civility strode our man, pacing up and down like a caged tenor, shrieking into the air. High pitch. Full vibrato. Not one syllable of it intelligible, yet every syllable of it audible. That is the genius of the modern phone bore: he achieves maximum volume with zero content.
We moved away. Of course we did. We are the sort of people who yield. But distance is no defence against a man whose lungs have been tuned for a stadium. Then the buggy arrived, and he chose the seat directly behind me. Out of an entire buggy, he picked the one spot that converted my ear into his microphone stand.
"Excuse me," I said. Nothing. He was busy dismantling someone, somewhere, with great passion. I tried again, louder. Nothing. My wife's elbow, meanwhile, found my ribs with the precision of a seasoned diplomat. Eve, as we all know, was fashioned from Adam's rib, and I suspect the design was deliberate: a built-in reminder, installed at the factory, that a husband's finest hour is the one in which he said nothing.
So I sat there and absorbed the full broadcast until we reached the parking area. He alighted, muttered a parting "chai chien" to the void, and wandered off to find his car, still addressing the invisible. My wife leaned over and said, “You have avoided an ethnic conflict.”
She was right, as she usually is. Which is precisely the problem. Why must the polite, the patient and the rib-nudged bear the cost of one man's refusal to lower his voice? We have normalised something absurd: that a person may annex shared space for his private grievances so long as he does it wirelessly.
Let us be fair to the offender. He is, after all, a victim of technology. The phone told him he was important. The earbuds told him he was alone. Nobody told him he was in a buggy with three other human beings, each of whom now knows more about his quarrel than his lawyer does. We have handed every citizen a megaphone and forgotten to hand out the manual.
The moral, my wife would say, is to keep my mouth shut. I would say it is slightly different. Some people do not belong in polite society, not because of their race, their accent or their golf handicap, but because they have mistaken a public place for their living room, and the rest of us for furniture.
Here is a modest proposal for the club committee. Install a small sign at the buggy stop: "Your phone call is not a public service." Failing that, designate a soundproof booth near the car park, preferably padlocked from the outside.
And for the rest of us, a final piece of advice. Carry earplugs, a sturdy sense of humour, and a wife with a good elbow. You will need all three.
Mihar Dias (mihardias@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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