There are few experiences more quintessentially ‘Melbourne‘ than facing ticket inspectors on the tram, but one woman has taken the art of dodging ’em to a new level: she simply ignored a ticket inspector’s existence until she could finish her transcendental meditation session.
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Yahoo7 reports Steph Athanasopoulos, 27, was approached by a Yarra Trams ticket inspector while commuting to the Greek consulate on Monday morning.
Instead of immediately handing over her Myki to verify she had ‘touched on’ to pay for her trip, Athanasopoulos chose to carry on with the final six minutes of her 20-minute silent meditation.
“I thought surely they’d understand, they will just think ‘ohh you’re meditating’,” Athanasopoulos told Yahoo7.
She said that optimism was unfounded.
“She smacked on the window next to my head, then she banged the chair, then the bag on my lap, then she started kicking my feet,” Athanasopoulos said of the increasingly frustrated inspector.
The meditator said she asked the inspector to return in six minutes. That, apparently, did not go down too well. Athanasopoulos said the ticket inspector barely “took a breath from her constant berating” and threatened to call the police if she refused to comply.
Another passenger confirmed the bizarre scene to Yahoo7.
Athanasopoulos eventually presented her Myki and her relevant concession cards, which apparently resulted in an all-clear from the inspector. According to her, the flustered Yarra Trams employee asked her what she thought would happen if each passenger took a solid 20 minutes to hand over their travel card.
“I replied ‘the world would be a much better place’,” Athanasopoulos said.
In a follow-up Facebook post, the chilled-out commuter said “I truly felt that asking this woman for 6 minutes to continue a meditation would be met with acceptance and understanding.”
“I was obviously wrong,” she added.
For what it’s worth, on-the-spot fines for fare evasion on Melbourne’s public transport system were abolished in 2017, but Infringement Notices for failing to produce a valid ticket can still cost adults $242.
There are no official guidelines on fines for astrally projecting away from authorised officers, mind you.
