At long last, I am finally on the road again after a solid month of local staffing. Given that I knew I wouldn’t be a Metro (subway) regular for the long haul, I was somewhat amused by the here and there escapades on the Metro system, including long delays and missed stops. I carried the same attitude that you might if you enjoy your job and affectionately refer to it as the daily grind. If it were a true daily grind, you would be decidedly less lighthearted about the whole situation, and if I were truly to commute an hour by crowded public transit five days a week for years, that would be the very definition of tedious (though it’s also the definition of normal life for thousands of Americans, which is probably part of the problem to be honest, those limited seats).
On a recent trip, I was on the subway ride for 1.5 hours bringing my morning trip dangerously close to the afternoon. Aside from spending a lot of time going not very far (just like taking a plane from Philadelphia to New York), the big kicker is that there’s no connection underground. You end up texting someone that you’ll need to postpone a meeting, and they don't receive the text until 20 minutes after the slated meeting time when you finally emerge from the station. Whilst underground, you’re also in the dark on the internet-surfing, news-reading front and you begin to consider outdated propositions, like bringing a physical book to your daily commute.
I’d like to suggest a Netflix service for the public library – and I am referring to the (outdated) physical mailing version. Any way you cut it, it’s a bullet dodged that I’m traveling again.
