Saturday, November 13, 2010 Karma, Manners and the MTA

The other day I was rushing to catch a train. I shoved my husbands credit card in the machine, ordered two round trips picked up my ticket and ran. Leaving the second ticket behind. $18.50 out the window. May the guy behind me in line, who OBVIOUSLY took my ticket, experience an equal upsetment.

Yesterday (actually this morning) while coming home on the 1:12 train, I sat next to a woman I'd seen moments before frantically trying to locate her train. I sat in the aisle seat with my ear buds, my chocolate bar and my diet Sprite, ready to endure the ride home after a ridiculously long day.

So this woman, who was sitting there enjoying her own chocolate bar, starts filing her nails! In public! Now this is a pet peeve of mine. It's gross. It's also very unsanitary. Health departments don't inspect nail salons because they want to fill their days with nonsense. They do it because bacteria love fingernails and people can get infections when equipment isn't used properly or sanitarily.

So as she's aerating her biological components I put my candy bar away - wanting so badly to turn to her and tell her off. And if the train wasn't so packed with hockey fans I would have switched seats with a disgusted demeanor. But I couldn't do either, so I turned up my music and tried my best to ignore her.

Then she starts clipping them! ICK! You heard me! Clipping her fucking nails in public on the train. There is no viler sound than a nail clipper. Again I wanted to turn to her and tell her off, but I just wasn't up for the confrontation. So I turned the music up even more.

If I heard something coming over the loudspeaker I took out an ear bud to confirm I was on the right train and after a few announcements and a manicure the train finally took off. Forty-five more minutes and I can go to bed!

Now, if you're not from around here I should say that every train leaving Grand Central stops at 125th street before they proceed onto Connecticut. So the train stops again, announces again where we're going and closes the doors. Bam. She turns to me.

"Is this train going to Stamford?"

I remove my ear bud. "Yup, first stop."

She begins to shift in her seat, worriedly. Nowhere for her to go...unless she wants to jump off a moving train.

When the conductor comes by it all becomes as clear as a topcoat of polish. She got on the wrong fucking train! She needed the local to get off in New Rochelle. So now she had to go to Stamford and get on another train to go back. Ha ha.

That's what you get when you're too busy paying attention to your nails when you should be paying attention to the train conductors announcements!

It was worth the $18.50!

-HH

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just remember you are in a train where every other car has a toilet spilling over with poop an blue bactricide that people tramp down through the aisles sticking to the bottom of their shoes and that that they have just walked through Manhatten which is worse and you won't have a worry about nail file lady. Meditate that all these gross things improve your immune system! Hahaha!

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