Commuter Chaos

I was so angry last week I could not even put my frustration into words. Here's what happened: I boarded the local commuter train at 7:30 AM to ride the 30 or so minutes to my office. Well, my 30 minute commute became an almost three hour nightmare!

You see, the area in which I live has okay transit but when visiting a city like New York you get really spoiled at how the transit can take you where ever you want to go either within or outside the City limits. Here, there is really only one convenient way to travel and two not so convenient and almost tricky ways to travel. And when the main route is balled up (which seems to be happening more often as the system ages) there is no hope.

Apparently someone thought it was a good idea to check on the track switching in the middle of the morning rush hour. Of course, the tracks switched but no one could switch them back. And the racks are located on a main artery of the commute. They ended up having to force the tracks back into alignment and then bolting them in place. What a disaster!

Meanwhile, the train I boarded was re-routed from a destination of downtown to a destination of a suburb the complete opposite of the direction I came from. Then re-routed again, then again before I finally disembarked with the umpteen thousand others to try and get on the right train. The problem: no one, not even the train attendants, knew which trains were going where. All the while the platforms were filling with potential passengers with no trains to board.

I finally boarded a train that announced it was going downtown and once boarded with the others packed in like sardines the train attendant announces that she *thinks* we are going downtown but after several stops she will let us know for sure. Well, as it turns out, we did end up downtown without having to transfer to another train, again. And three hours later I arrive at work just in time to jump onto my first conference call of the day.

These kinds of commutes make me wonder why I commute...