17 October 2005

the mta: making mondays even more annoying

i awoke this morning from the deadest kind of sleep. the kind where you don't even realize you're asleep, you're just somewhere else when that horrid sound of an alarm comes drifting down your ear canal. my duvet begged me to stay, but like a girl waking up in a frat house on saturday morning, i knew it was time to get out.

in my grogginess, i only vaguely noticed the increased frequency of stops and lengthy rests in the stations. but as the f train pulled into 14th street, the conductor came over the PA and said, without any further explanation, "this train is out of service". and with that hundreds of sleepy, annoyed, confused yet still apathetic new yorkers emerged from the train and looked at each other. i started to wonder if maybe i should just hop a downtown train, go back home and reunite with my duvet.


most of us figured we'd just wait for the next train, but the voice from above recommended we all get on a downtown f train and take it to west 4th, where we could transfer to an uptown d (the people trying to get to 23rd street had a major nightmare ahead of them, i'm hoping they just walked). so we all went up the stairs and walk along the corridor to change to uptown, when we hear our defunct f pull out of the station. "surely, there'll be another train along in a moment," i thought. so i went back downstairs to the uptown platform. and in comes a v, which luckily, gets me nearer to my job than the f. we then proceeded to make excruciatingly slow progress until i got to my stop no fewer than 25 minutes late. hurrah mta!

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