Welcome to JTC Inc.

Chaps: because if they had an ass, they'd just be called pants.

Thursday, November 16, 2006

It's GO TIME, Mr. Mandelbaum

As many of you know, I have recently moved to the suburbs of a large North American city and now take the inter-regional transit system known as the GO Train to work. Has anyone seen Train 48? Anyone willing to admit to having watched Train 48? It's exactly the same, except in real life the background scenery in the windows doesn't repeat like the background in Flintstones episodes. Anyway, here are my grievances with the GO culture:

1) People who believe they have ownership rights to a seat. The other day I got on a train and sat down in one of the many readily available seats (note: these trains do not have assigned seating). A few mins later, I see this women standing in front of me - giving me the 'evil-eye' (or it could've been the 'cut-eye') for taking her seat. She ended up sitting a few seats away. I'm sure I totally ruined her day, but I felt pretty good about myself.

2) People who jump off the train and do the 100-meter dash to their cars in full piece suits and briefcases in hand just so they're the first ones out of the parking lot. For some of these people this is the only exercise they get in a given day, but are you really saving that much time? So far, I've WALKED to my car everyday and haven't experienced any parking lot gridlock whatsoever.

3) Train operators who believe that announcing train stops is a public broadcasting forum for them to tell jokes and making unnecessary comments about weather like "looks like the rain is making everyone late this morning, I see a few less people than normal." I'm all for free speech, but I'm really looking forward to the day when they automate the stop announcements (like every train system in Europe) and thereby eliminate this job.

I'm sure more things will annoy me as time goes on (it's pretty easy to do) and you'll be the first to know about it.

No comments: