If it wasn't for my horse...well you know the rest.

My daily commute takes me across two subway lines, and all told it's about 30 minutes. So when I'm not in the mood for music, I like to take the opportunity to eavesdrop on my fellow commuters. Almost every time, I enter the conversation midstream so I don't know what the story's about, but the slice I do get is nonetheless interesting.

Catching those snippets of conversation, whether they be on cellphone, to a fellow person, or to oneself always make the trip more interesting. For instance:

I'm walking by a woman on the corner and all I hear is, "I'm keeping it. My God what a slut.", or a little further down the block, "lawyer says it will be fine as long as I don't talk to you about it."...perfect. Over the next half hour I get to imagine what that was all about.

However, yesterday, this simple pleasure backfired on me to the point of my wanting to kick some ass.

On the (2) heading down to Times Square, two guys get on the subway. Silent for a second, one dude says to the other, "Hey, you know Jason (something, I didn't catch the last name)?", The dude sitting down, listening, replies in the negative. The first guy goes on "Well, You won't believe what happened to him over the break."

Now, I'm thinking, me and the guy sitting, we are in the same place with this story, we don't know the main character, so it's a clean slate. This guy could be talking to anyone and it wouldn't make a difference.

He went on to tell a 20 minute story about how the guy, Jason, was going to get a bonus in lieu of severance package, then lost the bonus because his company was bought by another company. So he was fired and lost his severance. Then he was rehired by the new company at a significant pay cut, but now he has a severance package in place. However, he was planning on quitting the first job to begin with.

I watched as the dude sitting took in this story. But after 20 minutes, I realized it was the worst story I have ever heard. It didn't go anywhere, and since neither the dude, nor I had anything invested in Jason, we literally were being told a story for the sake of this guy talking about something. I wanted to kill him.

Especially since there was a lovely "I can't believe he did that" conversation happening two people down.

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