Commute

It has been a long cold winter, I haven't ridden the bike to work since early December.  DC just made the top of the list for gridlock.  I am so glad I don't drive to work.  

My typical morning commute at this time of the year, is a 10 minute walk to the subway station, wait in the cold for 5-7 minutes for the train, ride into the City, change lines, wait 5-7 minutes for another train, and three stops in the right direction and I come up an escalator right in front of the office door.  If I catch the trains without the waits, I can do it in 45 minutes, on a bad day, it can take an hour each way, on a really bad day it can take 1.5 hours each way.  On average I can ride it on the bike in just under an hour each way, plus time for a shower and changing clothes at the office.  

This afternoon, Metro (the subway system) was having a really - really bad day on one of the lines but not as bad of day as one of the customers.  The signs said, "Customer Struck by a Train."  That is Metro public relations for speak for someone has jumped in front of a train.  Nine our ten times it is a man who has jumped. Because of the design of the system, the jump almost always happens at the entrance to a station. If the jumper is in the middle of the line, the trains have to single track around the site, until the "extraction" and investigation are complete. Single tracking slows train volume by at least half, causing massive delays, especially at rush hour. Only once have I heard of a jumper at the end of the line (I live 10 minutes from the end of the Yellow line.) That guy really wanted to avoid inconveniencing others,  he jumped on a Saturday afternoon at the end of the line.  

No matter how bad of day I had, I had a better day then the guy who jumped.

I had two sisters in my office one day talking about their mother, one of them was really going on about what a terrible person mom had been.  The other sister stopped her in her tracks by saying, "she was better then that women in Texas who drowned all of her kids in the bathtub." It is all a matter of perspective.