What’s with the guy on the chairlift hacking his lungs out and spitting it out onto the snow slopes below…
Chairlift etiquette is sorely lacking if this season is anything to go by. I regularly sit next to blokes who think nothing of spraying their festy oyster phlegm (ewww gross) from the chairlift with no regard for where it lands below. You may call me sexist but I have yet to sit next to a female that has done this.
That’s not all either. So far this winter I’ve sat next to folks who appear to be screaming at the wind only to discover the ear piece under their helmet attached to their phone and realise I’m disturbing what would otherwise have been a private phone call. I’ve unwittingly inhaled vapour pen fumes as one chair neighbour took the time to pack and load his weed while heading up hill.
One man with compulsive disclosure disorder just randomly started telling us what a fantastic skier his daughter is, name dropping her ski pro colleagues and listing the number of resorts around the world he had visited. He never came up for air so none of us could contribute a single word for the entire 12 minute monologue. Though I know the two words we would have uttered if we could have and the second would have been ‘off’.
A woman on the chairlift next to me started sprouting scriptures and suggesting we all find the faith she discovered back in ’05 and it took all my will not to push her off the chair (unlike this guy who had no will at all). If you want a congregation go find a church, this one is taken and it’s not your god we’re worshipping.
I have alighted a gondola mid station to change cabins after three people acted as though there wasn’t a fourth (me) a stranger amongst them and proceeded to discuss the coked up parties they had attended before playing music on the loud speaker of their phone. Nice.
But for every heinous neanderthal we share a chair seat or gondola cabin with there are a bazillion awesome folks with great stories to tell from shared singing in the tram to tales of hilarity, adversity and tenacity. Some of the best human tales I have encountered I have encountered with strangers in a gondola.
The father and daughter duo from the Special Olympics who have been skiing for 13 years, the man who hasn’t missed a day skiing for 8 seasons, the would be Olympian, the first timer to the mountain with eyes like saucers. I love chatting on a chairlift and finding out other people’s stories of how they came to be on that same chairlift as me.
Unless they’re spitting, preaching, ranting or listening to music full blast.
What’s your worst chairlift companion story?
