Wednesday

So today’s been a day.

I woke up at 5:30. I was going to get the 6:08 train.

That train was delayed, alternating between 23 and 25 minutes, depending, I can only imagine, on which way the wind was blowing at the moment or on some strange whim of the person announcing it. The time would change every few minutes as we stood around in the cold.

The 6:28 train, however, was apparently operating on time.

Does the Long Island Railroad really think they’re fooling anyone with that? Like one train is going to leap-frog over the other, or they’re both going to arrive simultaneously on the same track? “Sure, one train’s towing the other,” my father joked. (This was one of the rare times we were taking the same train. Even a week-plus after Sandy, there are still few trains to choose from.) If the 6:08 train is running twenty-something minutes late, and the 6:28 is on time, then there is no 6:08 train. The LIRR can call it “equipment trouble” and “delays” all they want, but the train’s been cancelled and we all know it.

Of course, the 6:28 was running late, too. Something like 6 minutes.

When it arrived, it was short, which is exactly what you want to do when you’re expecting huge crowds of commuters, crowds so deep down the aisles of each car that, after one or two stations, passengers can no longer even get on board. You obviously want to remove entire cars from that equation. Who needs that space? I mean, it’s not like you’re running a reduced schedule and presumably have other trains sitting around. Oh, it is? And you do? Well then you suck.

The train was very crowded when I got on. It became progressively more crowded, uncomfortably crowded, as it stumbled along. I think today was actually worse than Monday. We had three more stops, at each of which more and more people piled on, then another stop where some got on, some got off. And then “just for today,” we added another stop, in Woodside, which is about halfway between Jamaica, Queens, and Penn Station in Manhattan.

I shouldn’t complain about this stop, though, since a guy who was sitting down decided to disembark then and I got his seat. I did that thing where you hesitate briefly, to see if anybody else is going to take the seat, without directly offering it to anyone else. You know, for fear that they’ll actually take it. But nobody else made a move, and I was really the only one well positioned enough to take the seat. (When I say you could not turn around, I am not exaggerating.) So I got to sit down for the last 10-15 minutes of my morning commute.

I arrived at the office around the same time as I did on Monday, maybe only about a few minutes later. Let’s call it 7:30-ish.

And then I worked and worked and worked.

I had a break for an hour, when I had to sit through a webinar about our new time sheet system. I am not exaggerating when I say it made me miss the train.

Of course, the evening train…now that was awful. Even more crowded, no seats at all, and oh, did I mention it snowed several inches tonight? I managed to get out of Manhattan ahead of the worst of it, meaning I was only on the train for maybe an hour and a half (standing up, barely able to move, pinned in from all sides by other passengers), rather than getting stuck on a train like my father did about an hour later. (He had a seat, though, so there is that.)

Because what we really needed right now on the east coast was a nor’easter and snow.