ManicDDaily

I’ve done everything wrong this evening and it’s all the fault of the iPad. I took it out at a friend’s apartment to show it off.

A wait for the subway and twenty blocks later, I realize I have left it at his apartment. I get out of the train, climb back to the street (a disorienting place since I’m not familiar with this stop), find true North, take a cab into a lot of traffic, retrieve the iPad, and go back to the subway.

This time (I had a long wait last ride), I walk several blocks to a busier and (I hope) faster station. Thirty minutes later (an hour or so after first leaving my friend’s apartment), I am still waiting for a train.

This is a very annoying station. It is at the intersection of a few different lines, but they are separated by different platforms and stairwells, meaning that you have to exclusively choose which one you will wait for.

I opt for the platform that has two related downtown trains, an express and local, figuring I am doubling my bets, but soon realize that the express train is simply parked about a third of the way down the platform, and the local never comes. Disembodied voices occasionally announce that the express is arriving, and people troop dutifully to that side of the platform, even though we all kind of know that no new train is going to hurtle past the one that blocks the track.

Finally, after much analysis of the light patterns on the stained subway walls on the local track, trying to divine impending traindom, I give up on this line, and follow the signs to another line, the Broadway line. The long stairs lead me to something silver–a train!==whose doors are closing.

This line has a little electrical sign to tell me the next train is 11 minutes away.

I rush back to the stairs to look down to the other platform (the one I’ve just left) where I can just make out a silver roof of a new train, a stopping train, a train whose doors will close before I can ever get there.

Now, finally (more than 11 minutes later) I am sitting on a moving train. It is not exactly my train, but it will take me to a stop in the general vicinity of my apartment.

Ah, and now, mid-trip, we are being held by the train dispatcher. There is another train across the platform, a train that may be better than this one. But I have my iPad on my lap, and I am too tired to re-arrange it, and–wait, that other train is actually a much better train for me (I suddenly remember all the walking and detours this one is going to require when I get off) but its doors have shut now.

Yes, my train, my right train, is moving on, and for some reason, we are still sitting here at a platform, doors open.

But, at least I have my iPad.

Hmmmmm……