input levels

Some people would stay in the pub to make a telephone call; I'd generally feel this showed little consideration for the person at the other end as they'd have to filter out the pubchatter and cope with the increased volume of speak required for the person in the pub to feel their voice was loud enough to be picked up. This gentleman leaves the pub to make or receive a telephone call, letting him speak more naturally and easing the listening of the person at the other end. In this case he probably had little choice as the pub is firmly beneath ground level and probably offers little in the way of mobile reception but it's the thought which counts.

I've covered general shoutiness of people before but it frequently astounds me how differently some of these other people around the place must perceive the world by the manner in which they interact with it. Can a difference in home accent make what I hear as a bellowing toff's bark into something acceptable to a bellowing toff's pal's ears? Does shoutyman in the team which sits next to my team's section of office have any inkling of the degree to which he sounds like a complete cock? Do the people who work in those McSouvenir shops not experience the same degree of dread and revulsion upon exposure to the dreadful music they play that normal people experience when they have to walk past the shopfront? Do people in lifts not notice the volume-related distortion of sound caused by their portable music-listening devices being turned up way beyond the maximally faithfully-reproducible volume of the earphones and the safety level of the hair cells of the cochlea? Do people who make their faces orange not realise it?

People obviously think in different ways about the same things compared to other people, often markedly so. Simply wandering around a museum, art gallery or city full of arts festival-goers is a good source of astoundingly inappropriate interpretations of things. Books of no apparent merit reach best-seller lists. Television programmes containing zero new information and no performances nor techniques of any artistic merit attract millions of viewers. On the internets there are pockets of what I would call normal reactions to things and pockets (often frighteningly large) of what might be termed inappropriate responses to extremely lame stimuli. People obviously think in different ways but it's often hard to think of some of their thoughts as thinking at all from the manner or standard of the various inputs and outputs they absorb and transmit. Sometimes a nonsensical reaction can be a learned response, though; not an excuse though it does explain. The brain's far too complex for it ever to be likely that a device to show the internal thought-workings to an external audience will be devised so inexplicable reactions are likely to remain unexplained unless their owners care to share their working.

Sometimes they do, but sometimes they only pretend to, instead making stuff up.