and the exhibits watch back

To a certain extent most people's days will feature some exposure to split-second fragments of other lives. Even when steaming along the street treating the other people as a peculiarly slowly-but-erratically-moving form of obstacle whose paths must be anticipated and avoided you catch the odd expression or snippet of conversation; more so on shopping streets, less so on the way to work. People like museum-guard blokey above whose job involves working somewhere where there's a constant flow of people must experience a much greater exposure to little splashes of their lives. When not being asked for information, telling people not to smear their greasy little hands all over the display cases, advising people that the museum is closing shortly or pointedly walking closer to a posh-voiced woman whose two ill-behaved little implets are stamping their feet and screaming in the Picasso exhibition room do they use their anonymity and part-of-the-furniture-effect to shift slightly closer to people in order to eavesdrop conversations whose snippets are more intriguing than others? With so many people to watch do they ever single out someone to study and follow to try and work out what they're thinking if they're not with someone to speak things at? Apart from checking that they're not stealing the artefacts do they leave the loners alone and sample the flashes of speech like the snatches of words between static on a radio dial until they find one which sucks them in?

I wonder if they ever feel a pressing urge to interject?

On rainy days like today they maybe get slightly richer pickings from all the people who only came into the museum to keep dry and don't really care that they're in a museum full of fascinating things when continuing their conversations from earlier in their days. Obviously there has to be a certain normal level of visitors merely using the location as an anonymous backdrop to their exchange of top-secret information or clandestine affair but if I was one of these people I'd feel compelled to ask the uninterested jabbering visitors to stop just randomly waffling shite to their husband/wife/partner/companion/friend/children and actually look at the things and read the information cards and stop letting their own lives spill out of their mouths for a minute in order to learn about that of someone else.

Of all the various random intersections of various lives every day how many of them catch and stick?

** ** **

Linkylinky:
LLCoolJim turns 300
Tigraki's nice shadowy stuff
Another where-is-he-now?