There's Something Happening Here

Let me paint you a picture...

Oh wait, Happy New Year!  Haven't blogged that yet, and the whole month of January is acceptable to say that.

OK, back to the picture.  It's a cold and blustery (I am still not quite sure what that word means.  It's some kind of orange?) January morning on the platform for the N/Q train station at Astoria Boulevard.  There is an average number people scattered about the platform waiting for the next train to take them all to their jobs/schools/whatevers.  The crowd slowly grows, and it appears to be that there is possibly some kind of minor delay.  Nothing a good Nook Book can't fix.  As I am reading about the adventures of Mikael Blomkvist and Lizbeth Salander, I start to notice that the people around me have started to get a lot closer, breaking the boundary of what I like to call "Josh Space."  I look up to see that there is good reason for this invasion.  The platform is packed like a commuter train in midtown at rush hour (a VERY uncommon situation at the Astoria Boulevard station).  They just installed a new sound system at the station, so I had removed my wrap-around ear warmers (calling them behind the head earmuffs would just make me giggle too much) to listen.  Silence.  Well, silence beyond the grumbling of the fellow commuters all seemingly equally aggravated that they are waiting in the cold on this crowded platform.  It's starting to look like an opening scene to a holocaust movie, families waiting for a train, no idea what's going to happen, dealing with things each in a different way.  Some couples huddling together for warmth, some people reading and/or enjoying their morning D&D coffee, and others just waiting impatiently for whatever is going to happen to happen already.  I am pretty sure I even saw a girl in a red coat.

After about 30 minutes (about three times longer than I typically have waited for a train on a weekday morning), a conductor is seen making his way through the butt-to-butt crowd, looking like the droopiest of droopy dogs. "Sorry folks, someone died on the tracks, there will be no N/Q trains heading into the city." Now this is where we find out for sure that there is something wrong with the collective energies of this city.

When people hear of a death, there a number of possible responses, most of which are acceptable.  There's the most common and most acceptable "Oh man, how sad," the quasi appropriate "Oh no! How?", the not very appropriate "is their apartment available?", and the not very appropriate "If he's anything like a homeless person, who cares," and the extremely inappropriate, "What the $&%*?!?!  Seriously?!  That's it, my entire day is shot!"  It's kinda amazing when you hear an entire platform of people of all ages, sizes, races and creeds shout that last one out in unison with a pitch perfect harmony.  It was pretty amazing actually.  If only I had known it was coming, I would have recorded it with my phone and posted it on youtube and it would have made 1,000,000 hits easily (and then maybe people would watch my stand-up videos).  Almost as crazy was seeing that same entire platform of people pull out their cellphones, call whomever needed to know about the delay, and again, half an octave higher, repeat their frustrations.  Mind you I am not excluding myself from this list.  Took me back to my days as a second tenor in my high school chorus.  Then the entire crowd paraded out of the station in true Music Man fashion and into 31st street, whether the cars were stopped or not, and marched on down the sidewalks towards the "safe haven" of Queensboro Plaza.  That's when the adventure took a Zombie movie twist, for there were no safe haven.  All the trains on the N/Q lines were stopped all over.  It wasn't until 10 am that the trains were moving AND became empty enough that people in the later stops could actually get on.  Thankfully people don't drop dead on the subway tracks every day, or I'd invest in one of those metal things with the 4 wheels and an engine...a dune buggy.

I'd like to say that the above story actually happened to me (wait no I wouldn't), but it did happen to my brother.  Well not entirely in that way.  I may have embellished here and there to liven the story up a bit, but the death and delay and the reaction are all true.  What actually happened was my brother left for work at 7:45 to get to his job in Brooklyn.  Waited on the platform at Astoria Boulevard for about Forty-Five minutes before that conductor came around and told everyone the news (despite the new sound system...maybe they didn't train the remaining MTA employees how to use it yet).  He then (thankfully) called me as I was just finishing getting ready to let me know that the trains weren't running because apparently someone died (no idea where, who, how or why exactly, just that it was on our line's tracks).  I was really hoping that once I left the apartment, the trains would be up again so I could laugh at my brother for having to depart the subway only to just miss it.  Alas, that was not the case, and people were still dejectedly leaving the platform and walking down the street (well the sidewalks on the side of the street, but you can see why that's more than enough to type) towards Queensboro to hopefully catch a train of any kind.  At this point I should have said to myself "self, there is a perfectly healthy R and M train which you could take into the city if you just walk in the opposite direction, or you can take the M60 bus from right at the station to 125th street and take the 1 from there."  Of course for some reason that part of me must have been sleeping.  I ended up trekking down the sidewalks of 31st street myself to get to Queensboro, hopping to hear a train passing overhead, alerting me that I will be able to actually take the subway in.  At around Broadway, my brother calls me at let's me know he has decided to stop and wait for the train at the 36th Avenue station, and I go and meet him.  The platform is still crowded.  After about waiting there for 20 or so minutes trains start to come in from Manhattan, which can only mean that trains will also start to leave Queens.  It took about 5 trains and another 20 minutes or so of waiting to finally get a train that was empty enough to get on.  Then my Nook reminds me that I forgot to recharge it last night and that it will need that recharging ASAP.  It fabulously didn't shut off at all during the rest of the trip.

Nooks are awesome. Way better than Kindles.  Just saying.

So thankful this kind of thing doesn't happen to often, and if Bloomberg didn't make so many awful MTA cuts of buses and such, I might have had even more options of getting in.

The collective reaction of the people is the one that I would like to take a look at.  I am sure my wonderful fiancee could shed light on the actual psychology of why this sort of reaction is common place in large urban areas, but I still can't believe it.  I leave it up for discussion.

Happy 2011!!!