Sheepism; or, People are stupid.

[infinitemonkies]

This last week its been incredibly cold in my area, even for this time of year. The weekend had a particularly nasty wind chill.

I'm on my way home with groceries, heading to the bus stop. The bus shelter is enclosed only on 3 sides, and the north is totally open. Of course, the very strong and way-below freezing wind is coming straight from the north.

There are about 6 people huddled in the shelter, totally exposed to the brutal wind, freezing and shivering their asses off. I give them a glance of incredulity, the step around the clear plexiglass walls to stand behind the bus shelter, completely out of the wind.

People are dumb.

[Chanlin]

You mean to say that solid objects act as wind-blocks.... NO WAY

[Crossbow]

There's a reason I refer to most people as "sheeple." That would qualify as a perfect example...

[Hyena Dandy]

I'm confused... Doesn't your bus shelter have closed doors? O_O

[alogram]

The bus shelter is enclosed only on 3 sides, and the north is totally open.

Totally open= no closed doors.

[Food Lady]

I am not as smart as people say. I'd have done the same as the huddled mass.

[Flying Grype]

This is an insult to sheep... sheep are smarter than that.

[Soulstealer]

I see this every time I've at the central train station. There are outside seats at each platform and also one enclosed inside. You can hear the annoucements either way and there's windows so you can't actually miss the train. It's getting cold people and 90% of the inside seats are empty while all the outside ones are gone and there's plenty of people standing around.

[Flying Grype]

I see this every time I've at the central train station. There are outside seats at each platform and also one enclosed inside. You can hear the annoucements either way and there's windows so you can't actually miss the train. It's getting cold people and 90% of the inside seats are empty while all the outside ones are gone and there's plenty of people standing around.

There is actually a logical explanation for this -- at least on my subway platform, people want to be closest to the train when it gets there. If someone is in the shelter, other people will accumulate between them and the edge of the platform. If the trains are really full, they might not get on the next one even if they were there longer.

[Aethian]

And the fact that some busses won't stop if people aren't in the bus shelter. Learned that one the hard way.

[Chromatix]

I have a funny story about that...

I was waiting at a station to go home after a visit to England. A variety of trains, operated by different companies and therefore of different types and configurations, stop at this station at irregular intervals. Most of them go a sufficiently long way that they offer seat bookings.

One of the many ways these trains differ is the way the carriages are labelled. Some have the A carriage at the south end, others at the north end - they don't change these labels when they reverse the train at the terminus, so A isn't always at the front. One of the long-distance operators had "helpfully" put up signs on the platform to show where the carriages on their trains stop - since they go to London, their A carriage is at the north end. But the train I was booked on goes to Manchester, so their A carriage is at the south end (presumably a historically consistent choice, because trains from London to Manchester end up the same way around in the Manchester terminus). That operator *doesn't* have signs up.

Back in the 1980s, long-distance platforms had four coloured zones set up for precisely this reason. You could ask station staff, or observe on the signs, which zone your carriage would end up in, and thus arrange to wait in approximately the right place without having to first do a lot of mental gymnastics and trivia knowledge. Now that the railways are privatised in Britain, such joined-up thinking (what station staff?) is considered positively old-fashioned. Sigh.

So, while very sensibly waiting in the covered waiting room, I chipped in on a dscussion some fellow passengers were having over where their carriage was likely to arrive on the platform. Observe here that there is only one covered waiting room, and it is not conveniently sited next to the only entrance, and neither is it in the middle of where trains stop on the platform, so there was a very real possibility that they would have to run the full length of the train - with pushchair, toddler and luggage in tow - in order to get to their assigned carriage. (Fortunately the Manchester trains are only three carriages, unlike the much longer London trains.) Alternatively, *I* was going to have to run the same distance, since I was booked into the opposite end of the train from them.

As luck would have it, the corresponding train heading north drew into the opposite platform at around this time, so I stuck my head out to try and spot what the carriage assignments were on it. Sure enough, A is at the south end. I'm in carriage A, so I expect that to show up right outside the waiting room. Carriage C, on the other hand, will be opposite the platform entrance.

I inform the other family of my conclusions. They, however, remain skeptical. Sigh.

So, the assigned departure time for the train duly approaches, as does the train itself - a fraction late, predictably, but nothing serious. The front cab draws up neatly level with the waiting room, and in the window on the side is a nice big letter A.

"Time to run, people!"

[Soulstealer]

There is actually a logical explanation for this -- at least on my subway platform, people want to be closest to the train when it gets there. If someone is in the shelter, other people will accumulate between them and the edge of the platform. If the trains are really full, they might not get on the next one even if they were there longer.

Yeah except that even after the announcment for my platform there's still a few minutes before the train pulls up. It may depend on the set up for different stations, in yours it makes sense, in mine you're freezing your ass off for nothing.

[Chromatix]

Yeah except that even after the announcment for my platform there's still a few minutes before the train pulls up.

We have trains to Russia - two each day to St. Petersburg and one to Moscow, IIRC. The announcements for these are read out in four languages - Finnish, Swedish, English and Russian. It takes several minutes to get through them all...

By contrast, the commuter trains aren't announced at all on the PA. There's a pair of flashing green lights by each entry on the departure board which indicates that the signal has been cleared for it, which usually gives a couple of minutes' warning.

At the main terminus though, the trains tend to be in the platform with their doors open for at least 10 minutes, giving you plenty of time to get in and warm up. Usually there's a train arriving into one platform as another one leaves.