Helping things along

People never cease to amaze.

The past Wednesday morning, during my ride to work on the train, I overhear a man speaking into the intercom with the driver (engineer?). He was sitting behind me so I couldn't see him, but being close enough I could clearly hear him. And what pressing matter did he have to report to the driver? (When the driver replied—which goes throughout the whole train, so we could all hear that—he asked, "Is there an emergency?")

The man wondered why the train was not traveling at full speed.

The train was probably going 20 - 30 miles per hour, but as one (he noted) who "rode the train to work every day," he felt it his duty to inform the one operating the train that there might be some issue with the wheels or something (as evidenced by the fact the velocity was not 40 - 50 MPH). That the train was traveling along tracks that run down the middle of a major boulevard and that it must stop at red lights could not possibly have played a role in why the driver would proceed at a pace slower than what might be construed as "usual"; there couldn't be instructions from the system headquarters dictating the velocity; there could only be some mechanical malady that the one in the compartment at the front had not discerned.

What was particularly compelling about his argument was how he peppered his observations and speculations with the interjection "You know what I'm sayin'?"

The driver could only stammer and undoubtedly suppress his inclination to say what he wanted to tell the overly impatient passenger. Eventually the man got it out of his system, having duly made himself heard. He had performed his good deed for the day (albeit spurred by concern about being late, not for the good of everyone), reminding the driver that the train can, in fact, go faster.

Apparently, all these years I've been riding have given me the wrong way of regarding how the driver runs the train. I have noticed on many occasions the train not go full speed and I concluded that when that happens there was a reason. I should have assumed the driver was just lapsing from paying attention, or perhaps that he mischievously sought to make me late for work. Surely he was just waiting to see how long it could keep it up before someone called him on it.

Silly me.