I’ve figured out a neat trick with my daily ticket I buy for Melbourne’s public transport. See, I have to travel via a V-Line train (country train) into Melbourne, and I buy a daily Melbourne public transport ticket there. What I have been doing lately, is giving my still-valid ticket to anyone I find attractive in the line for the train ticket machines at the train station, before I go to catch my country train home. What a sad excuse to talk to people, but I never said I wasn’t hollow. (Hang on. Yes I did.)
But I find trains to be the bloody oddest things. What’s up with a train leaving a train platform in the wrong direction for 10 metres, then going in the normal direction?? Do we need a runup? But the weirdest thing trains do, and V-Line trains in particular, is stop in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason at all. I mean, just today my train stopped somewhere in the ghettos of Footscray, not a train in sight, and we sat there for about 5 minutes. Other times I’ve been out in the middle of the country.. and we just sit there. Sometimes the train conductors actually bother to make up an excuse, like “oh, we have an engine failure” (which magicly fixes itself in 5 minutes); and another one they like to use is “oh, there’s a signal failure”. Whatever that means. I mean, there’s no signals out in the middle of the country. Except the ones given to them by the voices in their heads.
My favourite train-driver excuse is “oh, there’s a brake failure”. A brake failure – yes, that must be it, seeing as we just came to a completely comfortable stop. It usually appears to me that the brakes are working fine, if not better than they should be, if they’re stopping for no apparent reason.
I fell asleep last night with my electric blanket on 2. I woke up at 4am completely melted. So I turned up my blanket to 3. In this weather, being melted still isn’t warm enough.