The Little Engine That Damn Well Wouldn't

You know Those Sorts of days. You stumble out of bed, get ready for work, and suddenly realise that you're running late. Did you lapse into a fugue state? There's no other way for account for that missing hour of your life.

So you bolt off to the train station, just to see one pulling away from the platform. Ok, all is fine and dandy(let's be calm!). There's now half an hour to take some deep breaths, achieve some zen and phone the office with a (hopefully) plausible lie about why you're running late.

The "Where the Hell is The Train" phone app has a service interruption notice for trains roughly in the vicinity (but not actually on your train line, per se). But it's close enough. Convincing lie found.

When the next train finally arrives, you put your head down and move fast. Everyone's squeezed in like sardines*. Your nose is itchy but there's not enough room for you to raise your hand and scratch. Someone's headphones are definitely not even trying to contain the noise of whatever godawful excuse for music that poor future-deaf-person is listening to.

Still, the train's off...all the way to the very next station, where it is suddenly announced that for some mysterious reason, the train is now broken and everybody has to get off. Once they're all wedged tightly onto the platform, the train magically revives and hies itself off before anyone tries to get back on it again.

Cue an empty train platform.

This equals a thousand or so not-very-happy people, milling around on the tiny Erskineville railway platform and shying away from the platform because there are so many people to navigate around that it seems inevitable that someone is going to fall off the edge onto the track. People start swarming for the stairs... but here is where being a near-midget becomes an advantage, an almost super-hero quality. Ducking and diving under a succession of armpits, being short means you can plow your way through a throng and up the stairs to the road fairly quickly.

Where you then wait for another half hour for the bus, which wheezes its way into view and eventually deposits you at work only 2 hours late.

Of course, with 2 hours of deep thought invested by this time, the minor train service interruption notice on the phone app had been magnified in my brain to a disaster of epic proportions, backed up a photo of a jam-packed railway station. When I got to work, my all-singing, all dancing interpretive performance of the morning's traumas deserved a Tony award, honestly. If I could have fitted a tsunami in there somewhere, I'm pretty sure one of the major Hollywood studios would have snapped it up for a major motion picture.

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* Which can be a terrible situation when you're 5 foot tall and your nose is in the same vicinity as most people's armpits....