It’s One of Those Days

Yep, one that right royally screws you up early in the morning.

I take the train in the morning coz I’m a fan of riding the rails, and I usually take the express coming from Matara, since it only stops at two of the stations out of the eight between where I get on and off. It’s about 15 minutes faster than a slow train. As I came to the stations it was announced that it will be 15 minutes late, which is not unusual. So there’s a slow train that goes right after the express and it came and left, then out of the blue another slow train comes up, with no sight of the express in sight. So a lot of the usual express crowd get on that one, including me. When it stopped at one of the stations, where the express also stops, some of the people got down saying that the express was right behind. If this is the case then the slow train is held up until the express passes, so thought why wait and got down. Five minutes go by, ten minutes go by, but still no express in sight. After about 15 minutes it slowly makes it way to the station, by which time the previous train, the one I got down from, so that I can go faster, might have already reached its destination. So what else to do but get on the late express, and what happens, the bleeding engine gives up and the train doesn’t budge. Yes how wonderful.

The thing is that if I had stayed on in the earlier train, then it would have been definitely stopped to let the express pass on, but since I got down, oh no everything has to go wonky. Mind you this station is about 2.5 km’s from the Galle Road, so you have to take another bus to get to the Galle raod. Waited for another half hour in hopes that the engine will start and we’d be merrily on our way, but no such luck. Because of this fiasco all trains coming behind are also stuck.

I wait for about half an hour and decided to take the bus, and guess what happens after the bust starts to go. Yep you are right, the broken train starts to move. I tell you my timing is way off today. Apparently they’ve brought in another engine to push the broken down one from behind. Well what else to do but go ahead in the bus, with all the traffic and all.

These railway people need to be taught a lesson in information dissemination. Would it kill them to let the passengers know if the problem is solvable or not, and give some kind of time estimate? Whether they are even trying to solve the problem or not?

Anyways wasted 3 hour on the road on what is normally a 1 hour commute. I usually come to office early so it didn’t really matter, still managed to come as same time as others. Luckily the office doesn’t have strict working hours and we can waltz in any time we please. :), but what about the other people who have to get in before the “Rathu Ira”?

Normally something like this would have really pissed me off, but funnily enough I was highly amused by all this, and laughing to myself. Two conclusions, either I’m becoming more Zen like or I’m totally losing it, and I sincerely hope it’s the first one.



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