On Wednesday last week I came down to the platform and it was absolutely rammed full of people. That's not such an unusual thing, it's often extremely busy during rush hour. But it was busy enough that I let the first train that came in leave without me; I let the platform clear a bit and wasn't too bothered as the next train was only 60 seconds away. It turns out that was my saving grace. The next train pulled into the station emptier than a Scottish pay toilet, and I got a seat. I was sitting there for about 30 seconds, waiting for the doors to close, and they weren't - and that's when I figured that something was going wrong. You see, after you've ridden the same tube line for about 8 or nine months, day in and day out, you get an instinctive feel for how long the train takes to pull in, open its doors, let people off and then on, and then close the doors and head on in its journey. You know that it will stop a bit longer at Canary Wharf due to the volume of people, but when it's off - you just know it's off. So when the train didn't move, and the doors didn't close, I knew my commute was about to get bad.
The driver came over the intercom after we'd been waiting a few minutes, and told us there was a broken-down train on the line somewhere way in front of us and that he wasn't sure when we'd be moving. I waited, hoping for the best (sometimes these things can get made right, right?) but deep down knowing that it wasn't going to work out. It was as though if I could pretend that I believed everything would work out; if I could will it to happen and actually convince myself that this train should start moving, then it really would. But it didn't.
After another 5 minutes the driver came back on to say that there was a second train broken-down in front of us, and that if we could take an alternate route, we should. That was the end of my dreaming about a normal commute, and I bolted off the train and headed out of the station.
I encountered a few thousand of my closest friends on the way out. Sitting on the train, I had had my back to the platform, and never noticed the mass of people gathering behind me, themselves waiting for the train to move and probably a few people like me, hoping deep down that if they just wanted if bad enough, they could will the train into motion. I passed them on my way to the up escalator, which was rapidly becoming the direction of choice for people already on the Underground platform; once I reached the level where the barriers were, I saw a few hundred more of my friends, all held back at the barriers from entering the station. Now, my normal secondary route home would be a bit of a convoluted route using the DLR; but I was pretty sure that I'd missed the boat on that one not being full to the brim, so I decided instead, in all my wisdom, to take a river boat!
It came to me in a simple inspired flash of brilliance. "I know," I said to myself. "Take the river boat! You're right next the Thames anyways, it just makes sense." So I hoofed it down to the pier and caught the first boat out of that place. It turned out to be great. We passed by the Tower of London and I got to see that in a way I hadn't before; we went underneath Tower Bridge, and then onto London Bridge Station. I saw a whole new part of my city that way! So it turns out that not everything about that commute was bad. (Even if my normal 30 minutes turned into 150!)