When I first began commuting, I always thought it would be incredibly amusing (or rather, incredibly annoying) to record the noise that the M7A trains make before announcing stops, and use it as a text message alert on my phone. I never actually did it until recently, since the trains I usually ride are of the older variety. Friday I happened to leave work early and ended up on an M7A, so I made a little recording. It is now my text message alert. It could be yours too… I decided to put the noise up for download. Enjoy!

M7 / M7A Ding Dong

I feel incredibly guilty about an incident that happened today… I found myself laughing at the misfortune of an old man. While waiting near Grand Central for my train back home, I went to grab a bite to eat. At a table to my right was a woman and her child, and to my left, an elderly man drinking a coffee.

Unfortunately, the old man spilled his coffee. The woman turned to him and said something along the lines of “ah, it’s okay, these things happen…” in an attempt to make him not feel so bad. I don’t think the guy actually heard her though, it seems that he was deaf or hard of hearing. Anyways, he grabbed some napkins out of his pocket to wipe up the table, and some change fell out of his pocket. After wiping the table he looked at the ground to see the mess there, and saw the money. He picked up the money and exclaimed, “I found 30 cents!”

He put the money back in his pocket. Except his pocket must have had a hole, because the change tumbled back out and onto the floor. And being that he was deaf, he didn’t hear it fall out. This happened several times. Pick up change, put in pocket, change falls out. The lady at the other table looked at me, and I knew she was thinking, “what the heck??”

Eventually, the guy just gave up and went into the bathroom. When he came out, we noticed that the spill was a lot larger than we thought… His pants were soaked, and it most certainly looked like he had wet himself. The lady saw and said something along the lines of “oh, I feel so bad!”

I replied back, “Yeah, I didn’t realize it was so bad… I feel really bad for laughing, but I do think he found his thirty cents about five times though!”

She laughed, “Oh, you saw that too? He must have had a hole in his pocket!”

On the train home this evening, I sat next to a woman who after one stop, turned to me and asked, “Is this train going to New York?” Unfortunately it wasn’t. She had gotten on the wrong train.

It made me think back to a few times when I got on the wrong train. When I first started commuting to work, I got on a train in Brewster that apparently went express after a few stops and didn’t stop at White Plains. For the record, that was the first and only time I had ever been on a Harlem Line train that did not make a stop there. I was lucky enough to have a really nice conductor… he stopped the express train at White Plains just so I could get off. People at work joked around, if I looked more like my age or older (as opposed to looking like a 15-year-old or something) would he have still done the same thing?

Another time I got on the wrong train was when I was riding the Long Island Railroad from Northport station. Northport has only one track, so unless you are observant and notice the direction the train pulls into the station, you don’t necessarily know in which direction it will be heading. I arrived at the station exactly at the time my train was supposed to leave. There was a train on the tracks waiting, and my friend who dropped me off was like, “Run! You can catch it!” I ran my little ass off and did in fact catch it… Only to find out as the doors closed that the train was heading to Port Jefferson, as opposed to Penn Station. My train was late, and was waiting on an other track outside the station for this train to leave so it could pull up. I managed to get off at King’s Park, the next station…

I didn’t, nor do I even now know where the hell King’s Park is, but I knew I certainly didn’t want to be there. I think this was back before I had a cell phone, so I was looking for a telephone booth to call my friend for help. A scruffy looking old man stood in front of the phone booth. By the time I awkwardly got him to move away from it, I saw that the phone receiver had been cut off by a vandal, and there was just a wire hanging where it should have been. Yeah, that was a spectacular afternoon.

At one point during the colder months I began to keep score with the pigeons. Quite a few places have structures to deter pigeons and other birds from building nests. On the covered entrance portion of the White Plains station, there are metallic looking spikes that serve this purpose. But the pigeons have maneuvered through them and began nesting anyways. While waiting for my bus in the icy rain, I saw a pigeon fly to a nearby bush, break off a twig, secure that twig in its beak, and then fly back to the nest. This pigeon could have won prizes for endurance. I seriously saw him do this about a million times, and he was still doing it while I got on the bus. For outsmarting the humans who tried to deter birds from building a nest? Pigeons: 1, Humans: 0.

The next day, I found myself sitting on the shuttle looking out the window. Recalling the previous day’s pigeon outsmarting humans event, I noticed that the humans had tied the game. A pigeon had gotten run over by a Bee Line bus… with wings completely outstreched, desperately trying to make it away in time. Failing. And becoming a pigeon pancake.

In the grand scheme of things, I think that the majority of riders of public transportation have never fallen off the train platform. And that is an extremely good thing! The other day, I came incredibly close. Not because I lost my balance or anything like that, it was due to two incredibly stupid people. I was nearly mowed down by a fat train of stupidity. I’m not one to really be judging people or calling them names, but these idiots greeted me with views of their ginormous fatty ass crack. I didn’t want to see that. Hell, imagine they HAD knocked me off the platform. A fat ass crack might have been the last image imprinted on my fragile mind as I was mowed over by a train, my brain matter decorating the tracks. At least then the image would have been gone.

Seriously though, a man and a woman were walking down the platform, one riding on top of the other. Imagine riding piggyback, except that is when the other person is riding on your back. This person was riding on the front, so they were face-to-face. An incredibly convenient position in order to be sucking face while walking in a zigzag pattern down the platform. Quite obviously, neither of them could see where they were walking. And they certainly didn’t see me… though I certainly wish it were the other way around.