Nightmare at Park Street
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It’s after midnight and I haven’t even blogged yet. It’s been one of those days. Besides the usual insanity at work, I just missed a D train this morning. D trains are fast, but it takes forever for another one of those things to come along - that’s what I get for taking the alternate route. On the way home, Park Street station was unusually crowded. At first I thought it was some sort of sick fascination with the street magician, but it turned out that there was a disabled train on the tracks at Arlington. Somehow it was blocking traffic in both directions.
So I stood around and waited, and waited, and waited some more. If it were just the waiting, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but next came the smell. I think they towed the disabled train to Park Street; either that or it was in flames down at Arlington and the toxic plastic fumes drifted all the way past Boylston to us. People covered their faces with their scarves, and waited some more.
Of course, that’s the point where I started thinking about terrorist attacks. Maybe that occured to you a couple of paragraphs ago, but I was still annoyed about my bad day at work. But toxic fumes and terrorist alerts don’t scare off a real Bostonian. I paid $57 for that Combo Pass and there was no way I was walking home from Park Street. If a burning train had come through the station with Osama Bin Laden conducting and a North Korean nuke strapped to the roof, I would have taken it, as long as it was going my way.
It took me a total of 2 hours to get home - I think that’s a personal record. As an extra special bonus, my bad day at work was still going on in my inbox when I got home.
February 12th, 2003 at 10:11 am
If a burning train had come through the station with Osama Bin Laden conducting and a North Korean nuke strapped to the roof, I would have taken it, as long as it was going my way.
LOL, that’s hilarious! I dared to leave my Midwestern sub-suburban home last year and visit Boston. It was a great deal of fun, but I suppose less so if you live there. Having been there, I can vividly imagine the perils of the daily T commute.
Cheers!