#440: Ssshleeper

Huge numbers of people around the world commute by train each day. Many of them will have spent the previous evening watching inane late-night tv programmes and therefore be in search of a good sleep en route. This can be disrupted by many external influences. One major one is the entirely pointless ticket collectors that roam around clipping or inspecting people’s tickets (when the barriers at journey’s end seem entirely adequate on their own).

Today’s invention is a transparent plastic case which is attached to the passenger by a light chain. This allows the ticket in question to be left for inspection (and obscure clipping rituals) without its owner having to be woken by yells of ‘tickets please’.

Jocilyn_Pope_sleep460.jpg

I’d really appreciate one of these with a small microphone and some processing power on board which could listen to the wheel rotations on the track and calculate (even if the train speed varied from day to day) exactly when to sound the alarm in time to avoid me missing my stop.

This would mercifully bring an end to all those earsplitting broadcast announcements of one’s arrival at every single station.

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