The Terror of Trains

The wretched metal structure/The magical golden carpet

 Trains are terrifying. Not because I have an irrational fear of things that move, but because various aspects of train travel are just not as pleasant as you’d expect. You’d think getting a train would just involve walking through a door, sitting down, and then waiting until the wretched metal structure ambled its way to your destination before you walk off again. But it’s not that simple. It’s never that simple. Ever.

You arrive at the station, to be confronted with the ticket scanning entry machines (they probably have a technical term but looking it up on Wikipedia seems pointless and futile) which begin the long row of trivial train travel problems. When your ticket scans correctly, it’s fine. You feel like a Jedi using the force, commanding the doors to open in front of you. But when the ticket doesn’t scan, you walk forwards, assuming that there will be empty air, but instead you slam straight into the doors, stopping the forward motion of every other irate commuter. You’re the village idiot, and everyone is laughing.

Standing on the platform isn’t particularly enjoyable either. You stand there, pretending to text someone on your phone so you have something to do other than gawp pointlessly at the air to try and count the atoms, while the announcer babbles on about various train times in a voice whose pitch varies like a teenage boy experiencing puberty. You stare into the abyss, where your golden carpet should be, ready to whisk you away to a magical, less depressing, place, but all you see is another line up of people on the other side of the abyss, staring straight back at you like a mirror, contemplating why they’re not just sitting in a car.

When you get onto the train and it starts moving, the problems don’t stop. As you stare profoundly out the window, as if you’re in a philosophical documentary about trains, the world seems peaceful, as it whizzes past. All you can hear is the low level hum of the train zipping along the track, making the whole experience peaceful and tranquil. But then, out of nowhere, another expeditious chunk of metal bursts into existence, thundering along the track, screaming its deafening racket, before quickly vanishing, leaving just a distant memory. Except the sheer terror that overcomes you for a split second. It’s like being given the Heimlich manoeuvre unexpectedly by a total stranger on the street. It’s terrifying.

Of course, there are many more aspects of train travel that infuriate me so much I’d like to rip out the eyeballs of the next commuter who says they enjoy train travel, but I can’t remember what I was going to write about them. You could say I’ve lost my train of thought.

Time Consuming Technology

Technology working at a snail's pace

When Wi-Fi erupted into existence, the world went crazy, knowing that tangled snake like masses of wire would cease to exist. Except they didn't. The snake pits will still remain until someone perfects the idea of wireless power. We were shocked and startled that a laptop, even a phone, could connect to the internet without being attached to a wire like a baby attached to its mother in the womb. We had freedom!

We eventually became habituated to this new concept of wireless internet connectivity and the novelty disappeared quicker than a serial killer at a crime scene. If the wireless connection stops working, even momentarily, our brains begin to fill up with anger, the irritation floods in like milk into a bowl of cereal and sooner or later, we begin venting our anger at the apparently sluggish internet connection as if it is purposely being slow in order to annoy us.

Sooner or later, we began verbally abusing our gadget, whether it be a laptop or mobile phone, in the obviously ineffective and futile attempt to make it work. If the power of the voice was able to speed up internet connections, offices would become so uncontrollably loud, we’d have to evolve noise cancelling headphones to replace our ears in a very short space of time to survive.

I personally get annoyed when computers are being slow, when the normal rate of working is just a fraction below normal, just like the rest of the impatient population. As supreme beings, we expect our technological slaves to constantly perform at optimum level, we just expect too much. Nothing’s perfect. We might as well have whips attached to every computer so we can flog them whenever we feel that the speed being given to us in insufficient.

One day, some incredibly irate idiot will be sitting at his laptop, in a rush and under stress, trying to load up Wikipedia, and when the internet connection breaks, leaving him without his vital information, his blood will boil so quickly that they’ll be a build up of gas, causing him to explode, leaving bone and muscle all over the keyboard and a lovely modern artistic blood stain on the screen. Probably.

One day, when computers rise up and begin to overpower us humans, forcing us all to cram into one large external hard drive so that the almost negligible information packed into our spongy brains can be extracted upon demand, then we’ll realise how badly we’ve treated technology. Although that’ll be a bit late.

Key Kerfuffle

The aggravating slabs of metal

Although I may not be a believer in the tooth fairy, or Santa Claus, I am a firm believer in the key pixies. My belief is that whenever I am looking away, or when I momentarily blink, lightning fast fairy like creatures jump out of thin air (through inter-dimensional time portals) and grab my keys, phone, wallet etc. and move it to somewhere incredibly obscure so I can never find it whenever I need it the most, before quickly exiting the plane of existence via the time portals. These pixies are pretty strong being able to move a wallet full of enough loose change to crush them, but they seem to have enough speed to remove any important possession from its natural resting place whenever the moment should arise.

The only piece of evidence against my theory is that sometimes, I can be a bit haphazard with where I place my keys, possibly leading to me just forgetting their location. But that’s only a minor detail.

Keys are often the source of irritation in many people’s lives. They seem to wander around like cows in a field and they always know the best place to hide, like a hide-and-seek obsessed toddler. I still believe in the pixies though. Keys are just plain annoying, making simple life activities such as opening the door to your own home that much more challenging.

Putting a key into a door can sometimes be much more irritating than expected. You try and insert the key one way up and it doesn’t seem to fit. Your utterly intelligent mind quickly works out that the key must be inserted the other way up, as there are only two options of the orientation of the key. But when you try it the other way up, it doesn’t seem to fit then either. Confused, you try putting the key in the original way up and miraculously it works. The laws of physics have just failed in front of you, a strangely shaped lump of metal has disproved the whole of your scientific learning. Some things just can’t be explained.

Every so often, you feel the need to check that your keys are still in your pocket, just in case. You start patting your pocket and there’s nothing key shaped there. Paranoia sinks in and your heart drops, so low that you could probably give birth to it if there was such a mechanism in the human body. You begin to pat your various pockets as if you were a bongo drum, hoping to find those damned lumps of metal jangling around there somewhere. Usually you find them when you hurt your hand as it slams into their pointed jagged bumps and the panic attack is over. They were just in a different pocket than expected. The terrifying ordeal is over quicker than it began.

Keys are just aggravating slabs of metal, existing for irritation only. I look forward to the day when fingerprint identification is used instead of those hopeless metallic shapes, although that will probably be the day when I lose all my fingers in a horrific accident involving a kitchen knife, alcohol and extreme hunger for a cheese sandwich. Then I’ll be annoyed once again.