After all, I was trying to read a newspaper, or compose a hilarious tweet about EastEnders, or dumbly gaze out of the window like a cow obliviously trundling towards an abattoir.
In my case, I joined a group that held vigils outside an abattoir.
The Maison is part of a Nice's dynamic contemporary arts association, Botoxs (botoxs.fr), which organises exhibitions all over town in alternative spaces that range from an old petrol station to Matisse's atelier in the 1930s, and will soon feature the city's ancient abattoir.
In a large abattoir, at least one MHS inspector will be there the whole time, a vet for part of it.
The meat hygiene service, which is responsible for monitoring abattoir standards, is being transferred to the food standards agency in April and Professor Lang wants assurances that "such sloppiness is not carried over into the agency".
Election night on television is always a weird mixture of horror and tedium, like a Paranormal Activity marathon, or a nine-hour real-time BBC4 documentary set in an abattoir.
The DAP recently threatened to quit a PAS-led state government after it demolished an unlicensed pig abattoir.
From the terrace outside his fifth-floor office, Antonio Mega Ferreira, the president of Nations Park, points out what was there before work started: an oil refinery, a barracks, an abattoir and a rubbish tip.
But the home of light-touch supervision now fancies itself as the abattoir of too-big-to-fail finance.
The sporting arenas have been built and tested, and the main Olympic gathering-place, on the site of an old abattoir at Homebush, west of Sydney, is ready for the opening ceremony on September 15th.
The arrivals hall still has a faint abattoir feel.
