Master Of Serenity Ignores Tram Inspector, Meditates Instead Of Presenting Ticket
Serenity now.
Just as there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, it’s not always easy to find ethical employment under capitalism either — we all have to work, whether we like it or not, and that means many of us can find ourselves doing horrible jobs that we don’t morally agree with for barely any money.
For example, a lot of human beings are ticket inspectors, a job that involves narking on your fellow human beings over amounts of money that are probably nominal to you, but matter a great deal to people less financially well off. Nobody grows up dreaming of a job that will one day enable them to ruin the mornings of their fellow humans, but sometimes that shit just happens.
To that end, most ticket inspectors treat their job like the unpleasant but necessary exercise in bread-winning that it is. But then, every now and then, you meet an instructor who takes their work far too seriously.
"I'll be finished in six minutes"
That's what this commuter told a @ptv_official ticket inspector mid-way through her meditation session on a Melbourne tram.
Here's how it went down | https://t.co/qkRenlsBAe
@Y7News pic.twitter.com/CZKxWvp1Iv
— Samuel Hussey (@smhussey) February 26, 2019
Case in point: a Melbourne-based master of serenity, Stephanie Athanasopoulos, was recently meditating on her way into work on the tram, when an inspector came around and asked to see her ticket.
Given Athanasopoulos had her eyes closed and was deep in a TM session, she didn’t immediately open her eyes.
That’s when the instructor decided to use “physical contact as a means to get” Athanasopoulos’ attention, as the latter explained later on Facebook.
“I only became aware [of the inspector] when she smacked on the window next to my head, then she banged the chair, then the bag on my lap, then she started kicking my feet,” Athanasopoulos told Yahoo7 News.
Even when Athanasopoulos told the instructor that she’d be able to respond to the request in six minutes, when the meditation session was up, the instructor responded with threats of calling the police.
This story about a woman getting berated by a tram ticket inspector for six full minutes while she wrapped up her meditation before producing a valid ticket is the funniest thing I've read and very much the level of zen I hope to achieve from meditationhttps://t.co/kASg7xWGTe
— Soon-Tzu Speechley 孫子 (@speechleyish) February 26, 2019
Eventually — but only when she was done — Athanasopoulos took out her Myki, and presented it to the inspector.
Credit to her: it’s hard enough to meditate in a busy public place like a tram; harder still to meditate while an inspector who should resolutely chill the fuck out is banging on at you about distinctly worldly problems.