Thursday, January 26, 2012

Trouble in the Trenches

So today was a wasted day. I got up bright and early for my internship all prepared for my long slog in the office and skipped on down to the Woodley Park Metro Station. Immediately I knew something was wrong. Even for the rush-hour traffic there were far too many people on the platform. Getting on the tips of my toes I checked the boards and eventually I found out that there was an unscheduled track maintenance. From what I could find out, one of the rail's along the Red Line had "cracked". Not a problem. I always leave early and I have a comfortable window of 20 minutes or so in case of things like this. Well, those 20 minutes swept on by, as did train after train of packed cars. When I say packed I mean packed. The cars were so stuffed that there wasn't enough physical space left on any of the cars as people were shuttled off to downtown DC. I considered calling my intern coordinator to inform him that I was late when I realized I didn't have his phone number. What's worse, service was terrible. I had been there for close to 45 minutes (the point of no return, I was going to be late even if a train appeared out of nowhere) before giving up. I huffed it back to my apartment to shoot an e-mail to my supervisor. Wasn't going to make it.

As I was about to press the elevator call button one of my acquaintances (who happens to be working for a powerful Republican House Member) bumped into me. She was about to do what I had just done. She convinced me to give it another go so together we went back down to the metro station. I spent another twenty minutes or so watching full traincars go by with no real ETA on the next train. At this time, a little before 10:25 (I had left my room at 8AM) I decided to just go back to my apartment. I sent my supervisor an  e-mail and hopefully there won't be any repercussions.

I'm sure they would've wanted me to come in later over not coming in at all, but I weighed the options. I didn't want to cram myself in the traincar and get smushed between the closing doors (this happened to me twice and I had to get off the train both times), nor did I want to wait another half hour in that station. I could've taken the bus, but everyone was taking the bus. Equally crammed. I don't have a car, and I sure as hell wasn't going to pay for a cab to go across DC. I'm doing this for free, and on a good day its a 45 minute commute. I'm sure I'll get some small talking-to for it. Who knows! I spent the day catching up my reading, running some errands, and being lazy.

Hopefully tomorrow will be better. Important meetings tomorrow so I'll make more of an effort to get there, late or not.

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