Let me preface this blog by saying that I am a huge Larry David fan. My wife, in fact, has been known to call me the WASP Larry David.

There—that’s out of the way.

So last night I was taking the train home, which is what I do given my new life in the ‘burbs. I was happily immersed in Hilary Mantel’s really remarkable sequel to Wolf Hall, Bringing Up The Bodies, the saga of Thomas Cromwell and 16th century England. Read it, it’s great.

Until every ten or fifteen seconds, I started hearing this odd electronic chirping noise—like a plastic cricket made in Taiwan. It did have a Chinese water torture element to it, now that I think about it.

After hoping in vain that it would go away, I peered around trying to find it. Of course it was the guy seated behind me. Probably in his late 50s, he was playing some kind of card game—solitaire, maybe—on his Blackberry. And whenever he did something right, apparently, the game would make that incredibly irritating noise.

Don’t you just hate to be in that situation? Where you think, I could just suck it up and say nothing, but then I a) feel like a wimp, and b) have to listen to this incredibly irritating noise while I’m trying to read a really good book. But on the other hand, if I say something, then I feel like kind of a douche.

Again, given my empathy for Larry David, I don’t really care that much about feeling like a douche, so I turned around and said, with all the politeness I could muster—a perfectly plausible amount—”Excuse me, would you mind turning that down?”

I didn’t even say “turn it off,” which I thought was pretty reasonable of me.

The guy looked shocked. Outraged! That anyone could so object to the electronic sound effects of his smartphone game.

“You gotta be kidding me,” he said.

“You gotta be kidding me”? You gotta be kidding me.

I shook my head to reinforce the point that no, I wasn’t kidding him.

“Alright, alright,” he muttered, and turned the sound down.

And I thought about that for the uncomfortable ten minutes or so until the train reached my stop. Why on earth would someone think it was so outlandish to be asked to turn down the sound on his phone? What makes people think that they have the right to invade other people’s space with noise—especially noise of such a jejune nature?

And more: Why on earth was it important to this man that his card game be accompanied by electronic sound effects? Was it some kind of Pavlovian ritual? Some kind of aural addiction?

I have no idea what the answer is to any of these questions, which is, I think, a microcosm of why I sometimes feel so alienated from modernity.