Laptop attraction

I often take my laptop on the train and hack away at some code. It's a bit geeky (particularly as I'm on my way to or from work where I'm paid pretty much for the same thing). But twice recently it's made people speak to me.

It's an unwritten rule that you don't engage in conversation with your fellow commuters, although of course there are exceptions. One is if someone has a baby or a dog: you can talk about those. Another is if something funny happens. A third is if there is a long enough delay.

Seeing someone using a laptop isn't usually an opportunity for a conversational gambit. For one thing, it's not anything unusual. There are probably several people in any carriage with laptops (although we congregate in the carriages with tables). And then there's the fact that we've obviously got our laptops out because we are busy. The person who'd welcome a chat with a stranger is more likely to be the one sitting there with nothing to do.

But twice recently people have begun a conversation with me in connection with my laptop. The first one sat next to me, opened his own laptop, and asked what I was doing. I mumbled something about debugging user interface generation, and he said he was making a web site for his fetish club.

And then he showed me photos.

There were people in strappy leather with boots and whips. He told me where I could find this club (above some pub) and which nights it was on. I think he must then have realised that I wasn't comfortable looking at his wacky porn on a rush hour train, so he left me alone.

Most train laptoppers are doing word processing, email or spreadsheets, and they're using the obvious Microsoft stuff. So me programming is perhaps a bit of a novelty, which brings me to the second chatterer. He said he'd noticed that I was writing Java code, and what IDE was I using? I was puzzled. He's understood enough of what I was doing to know what language it was, but not enough to realise that I wasn't using an IDE. I replied it was just a text editor. But what did he want? A geek-off about which IDE is "best"?

In both cases I had the feeling that the apparent interest in what I was doing was just a gambit that for the other person to talk about something else. I didn't want to talk at all. So, all commuters please note - I'm not tapping those keys as a way to make friends or meet people. I'm doing stuff I want to do, because it's my quiet time to get on with something that interests me.

Go away!