Interesting Eavesdropping

I don't usually listen to other people's phone conversations on the train. Well OK, let's say I don't usually find other people's phone conversations interesting enough to remember. After all, short of sticking my fingers in my ears and singing "La, la, la, I'm not listening." there's little you can do to not hear someone sitting next to you talking.

However, the other day the woman sitting next to me said something that made me actually pay attention. She had just taken a call from someone, it was fairly innocuous stuff but then she said something like "I'll be there soon, I'm just about to get on the tube." Now, this was a blatant lie as she was sitting right next to me on the train. I did consider that she was going to get off the train (it was a bit earlier than the one I normally get so stopped a few more times) and then get the tube but she got off at Surbiton, which as we all know doesn't have a tube station.

So then I started to wonder why she'd lied. There are two obvious possibilities, and a few less obvious ones. The first is that she wanted to surprise the person who called by turning up unexpectedly early and the second is that she wanted to give herself a bit of time to do something without appearing to have taken too long to arrive. But let's think about this for a moment. Perhaps she knew someone else was listening in to her phone calls and was trying to throw them off a bit. Or perhaps she was trying to trick someone, such as a potential lodger, into thinking her house was nearer to central London than it really is.

I suppose as well that she could have said "tube" but meant to say "train".