The bitching continues...

There is something about people with bags on crowded trains that bothers me.

It may be an utterly mundane subject, but if you commute to work on the train and do daily battle with the rush-hour crowd like I do, you may empathize with me.

Everybody loves their little bit of personal space around them, the more the merrier. And such space on a rush-hour MRT train is indeed a rare commodity and priceless. So, if it's not already a harrowing experience when bodies start piling against you from all directions, it only gets worse when these bodies also have slung on them bags, folders, files, and other paraphernalia. These, being inanimate and devoid of tactile capability, have the more pernicious effect of making physical contact with you without their owners' realising it. They shove, poke, graze, grate and scratch, and God help you if the point of contact is your bare skin.

As these items are often slung sideways over shoulders, carried on backs or in hands alongside the torso, they protrude unnaturally from the owners' natural physical profiles and have that annoying propensity to molest the hapless bystanders in their midst.

Why can't the bearers of such effects, upon stepping into a train chock-a-block full of people, exercise that little bit of consideration for others by shifting their offensive bags off their shoulders or backs to the front of their bodies within watchful sight where they are less likely to become a source of annoyance?