The waiting game

Yep, it happened again! I’ve just experienced one of those days where public transport is not in your favour. Yesterday, on two mystery shop visits, I literally strolled from one train onto the other; such was my luck in the lottery that are timetables.

However, my luck decided to sway the opposite way. I did one visit in South Milford today (which equates to east Leeds) that took three hours of standing around and waiting to accomplish.

The problem is that it’s Sunday. Sunday seems to be the perfect day to do maintenance work on rail lines, which in effect meant that, for me, a journey that should have taken no less than one hour took four. I arrived in Leeds station at 12 noon, only to find out, thanks to maintenance on the lines, that my next train was at 1 pm. I arrived back at the station in South Milford at 1:30 pm, only to find out that the next train back to Leeds was at 3:00 pm.

I had a lot of time to kill, and instead of ruining my eardrums with my ipod or straining my eyes with my book, I instead went for a little jog. Now, this is highly out of character for me – I hate jogging as it is laborious, tiresome and my hair flops down in front of my face which makes me look (and feel) like Mark off Peep Show.

So, with two hours to kill I went for a canter around South Milford, lost in my own thoughts. It was an interesting mind path I went down, which saw me reflecting on some of the things I forgot to write about in yesterdays blog.

For instance, there was a man I passed in Leeds yesterday who looked like he was in training for Mr. Olympia, or whatever they call that bodybuilding championship. He was – as they say – ‘stacked’, and bulged out of his shirt. However, he had seemingly overdone it, as, moving my eyes up from the grotesquely titanic forearms to his face, I noticed that his eyebrow muscles, yes his eyebrow muscles, were bursting out of the skull. Obviously he had surpassed a vigorous training regime of eyebrow thrusts to pump those forehead features. Unfortunately, no matter how ‘ripped’ his head may have looked, it still looked like an arse. I was staring at an original butthead, and couldn’t draw my eyes away until he walked past.

I also saw possibly one of the gawkiest things ever yesterday, on the train towards Bradford. The train was fairly full and so I walked down the aisle of my carriage looking for a seat. I didn’t find one and so stood behind a guy sat down who looked like a nerdy computer geek, with milk bottle bottoms for spectacle lenses, 40-something bald patch, and an iphone. Pretty normal on a public train, but as I peered over his shoulder to see what he was doing on his iphone – he was being very vociferous about something – I saw he was on facebook, ogling at photos of himself.

I was fairly impressed that this guy had facebook, although he looked like one of the people that probably helped program it in the first place. Base social interaction was on his cards. However, all piddling dribbles of respect for this pot-bellied geek went out the window when his phone rang. There’s no greater shock than suddenly hearing “Wow! I feel good! I knew that I wou–” coming from the phone of a geek. The guy was fumbling to answer his phone in a ‘shit I’m so embarrassed by my ring tone it actually makes it more embarrassing’ kind of a way. For surely there’s nothing more embarrassing than someone knowing you’re embarrassed about something.

Anyway, back to today. I had decided to go jogging. I set off on a road out of South Milford (so that less people would see me trying to balance a heavy, slack rucksack on my back whilst on the run) and found myself on a nice quiet road. Unfortunately, due to a complete lack of fitness, I was knackered after about 500 yards and so had to sit down on a park bench, where I pulled a chocolate bar out of my bag, got out my book, and indulged in some serious renaissance literature study, waiting for the train home.