Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Another Day, Another Body?

I started off my morning with a somewhat productive meeting. This was a nice treat, given that I'm not quite used to meetings of the productive persuasion. The last job I had that wasn't teaching English gifted me with a meeting a week where the manager would admit that we were having a nonsense training session where we would learn how to do something that our centre would probably never actually have the tools to accomplish. It sure is nice to work somewhere that is not entirely full of shit.

I was in pretty high spirits when I entered the subway station, enough so that I even overlooked the unusual sound the train was making down below. As I got down to the subway platform, I saw that the sounds I had heard were from a train that had backed up and come to a complete halt around halfway down the platform. Odd, I thought. Odder still were the hoards of people moving down to the other end of the track. It took a minute or so for me to take a glance down at all the commotion and realize that there was something that probably used to be a person 20 meters or so down the track from me. I was far enough out that I didn't have clear sight of it, but from where I stood it appeared somewhat like a mangled rag doll.

Why is it that when terrible things lie in the distance, we have the urge to go and take a look? I didn't, in the end. Good choice, as now it's probable that I will sleep tonight. However, since I didn't go look, I'm not really sure if somebody died, if they threw themselves in front of the train, if they were trying to save somebody else,  if they got pushed, or if they just collapsed on to the tracks before the train got there. Judging by the way the train conductor was wiping the front of his train, and then later completely backed that train out of the station , removing it from immediate use, I'm going to say that whatever it was, it wasn't good.

The rest of my day was significantly better than this. 

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