can go wrong

Today there was an delay between Roseville and Chatswood, so they re-routed my train through Central. The train I take is direct and quite good when it runs without incident (as it does the vast majority of the time), but my stop is the one just after Chatswood, so they told us what to do on the PA: if you are going to a station before or including Roseville, get off at Hornsby and catch a train down the North Shore. If you're going to a station Chatswood or later, stay on the train and change at Central. Then they closed the doors. Then they said "oh and by the way, if you're going to Chatswood, the train behind this one is going to Epping and you can take the Epping to Chatswood line. Granted maybe I should have thought of that myself, but the Epping to Chatswood line is brand new still and I still forget that it even exists. But WHY oh WHY do you continue to give us vital information AFTER it is of any use to us CityRail?

The station closest to where I live has a short platform, meaning if you want to get off there you have to be in one of the rear four cars. It's fine if you commute, like me, because you know. Imagine you didn't know that though. Well it's okay because they usually make sure to inform everyone on board long eight car trains that if they want to get off at Narara, they need to be in one of the rear four cars... AFTER they have already left Gosford station and it's too late to actually move because it's not possible to get from the 4th car to the 5th car!

But I digress. By the time we got to Central, they had changed their mind, and the train I was on was going all the way to North Sydney, which is great, right?, because then I don't have to change at Central or Town Hall where it's going to be crowded and a mess (Town Hall station in particular is horrendous in the morning rush hour). Except because of all the delays, all the trains going up the North Shore line were going one legged dog speed^[1]. Seriously.

At about that time I realized, and should have realized sooner, that had I taken the Epping to Chatswood line and WALKED from Chatswood to work it would have been faster. Again, good to remember for future reference. I sent my boss an SMS saying “hey gonna be late” or something along those lines. I knew he'd be cool about it because he usually is. Gordon was also late today, calling Andrew two minutes before he got in (and after I got in, even though I was late myself), to say he was late, and Andrew said “You know it really doesn't do me any good for you to tell me now that you're going to be late”. It kind of annoys me because I usually go out of my way to let Andrew know that I'm running late before I'm supposed to get in. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

My computer has crashed when I do finally get in, and my laptop crashes as well trying to come out of hibernation. The latter a little bit is my fault, because it never likes to wake up if I have any VMware Virtual Machines running when I shut the lid. The notebook is fine after rebooting, but my work computer is totally broken. Nobody is around to take a look at it because nearly the entire IT staff is out kicking a soccer ball. This would be kind of embarrassing, if, say, our primary purpose as a company is providing IT support, which actually IT IS.

So I don't get logged onto the IM until 11am or so because I'm futzing around with computers that don't seem to want to do what I want them to do, by which time Lena has gone to sleep meaning I missed talking to her this morning. A while after that I see that she's posted to Twitter that she ran out of gas on the way home, something which I know by experience is a frustrating experience, and I suspect that she's having an even worse day than I am.

They said on the PA that the reason for the delay was there had been a death on the line, meaning the delay was because somebody died. As frustrating a morning as I've had, I suppose it could be worse.

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1. By an unusual quirk in the space time continuum, one legged dog speed is the same speed as Santa Claus driving a school bus