Suzanne Harrington: The one aspect of modern life that boils my bodily fluids

The problem with speakerphone is that, whether boring or salacious, there is no option to opt out

Public transport is the worst place to be trapped with such aural abusers — you can end up displacing yourself.

I am loath to moan about modern life being rubbish because harking back to the ‘good’ old days makes you sound like Nigel Farage.

Imagine romanticising an era of drying clothes with a mangle, smoking in hospitals, and compulsory tradwifery. A time when nobody had heard of avocados or female sexual pleasure. The horror.

But there’s one aspect of modern life that boils my bodily fluids. The speakerphone. Jesus Christ. The only thing worse than overhearing one side of a conversation is overhearing two. 

As I write this, I can hear my partner from three rooms away, arguing with eBay about a delivery. The person he is arguing with is in the Philippines, but he might as well be sitting on my head, so loudly crystal clear — yet robotically disjointed — is his voice. 

My partner loves speakerphone. He conducts all his calls using it, so that I get to hear every single word of every single conversation, unless I were to stuff XL tampons in my ears and lock myself in a lead-lined cupboard. I don’t have one, but maybe I’ll start saving up.

And while not all speakerphone conversations involve tedious minutiae — some can brim with juicy dating intrigue of the newly divorced and other midlife tattle — the problem with the speakerphone is that, whether boring or salacious, there is no option to opt out. 

You are forced to listen. All you can do is throw things at their head while making furious throat-cutting gestures to STFU. This only works if you know the person.

You can’t really chuck things at strangers, because they might interpret it as assault. Which may explain the great emboldening of randoms using speakerphone in public places — there is no universally agreed sanction, other than glares and tuts. 

Public transport is the worst place to be trapped with such aural abusers. You can end up displacing yourself. You jump off five stops too soon in your desperation to get away from hearing about someone’s husband’s gallstones.

And yes, headphones are the obvious answer. A city-dwelling friend has an elegant solution. She keeps half a dozen cheap sets in her bag, the kind you get free on planes. 

Whenever some numpty decides to share their latest TikTok, at tinny top volume, with the entire bus or train carriage, she sweetly offers them a pair of disposable headphones, as you would a toy to an unruly child.

This works on so many levels. The selfish noise terrorist feels they are being given a free gift, the surrounding public are being given the gift of quiet, and the headphones giver can enjoy a warm glow of smuggery, having effectively yet non-violently shut the idiot noise-maker up. Win-win-win.

The only downside to this strategy is that it requires you to be two things — a nice person, and organised. If you are neither, your only other option still involves headphones — your own. 

For Christmas, to cancel out my partner’s speakerphone fetish, I request noise-cancelling headphones. Genius. Instead of being forced to end an otherwise perfectly amicable relationship, I may now just weld my massive padded headphones to my ears, like I am about to emergency-land a Boeing. 

And turn my playlist up to 10.