Hello! You may have noticed that I haven’t blogged for a few days (or not…). I was far too busy this weekend to get on the computer! Live music, watching England get absolutely stuffed at rugby in an utterly embarassing performance, cocktails, a full Irish breakfast at the pub for St. Patrick’s Day, watching Newcastle undeservedly lose at football, night out for St. Patrick’s Day…
This morning, I got up expecting life to return to normal after my unusually full weekend. Before leaving the house, I quickly checked the Internet to see whether my train was on time. “Warning,” said the Deutsche Bahn website. “Due to strikes, trains in Baden-Württemberg may be subject to delays or cancellations.” My train, it transpired, was delayed by 110 minutes (Deutsche Bahn don’t seem to believe in hours…). And the next train I could have taken was cancelled. The regional trains were apparantly running as normal though. So I sat back down for a bit before heading out to catch a regional train.
I arrived on the platform to find that the train was not already there. This is unusual – it leaves 10 minutes after my usual train but is normally already sitting there 5 or 10 minutes before mine even arrives. Today, there was no sign of it although the information board mentioned nothing about I delay. I waited, along with a number of other people, but the train never came. Then we noticed another train with the same destination sitting on a different platform. So off we went to platform 5. The train driver was standing looking out of the window, so we asked him whether his train would be going to where we wanted to be. “Yes, at some point,” he replied. It was 5 minutes to 8 at this point, and he informed us that his train was actually the 6:55 one but he hadn’t been given permission to leave yet, so he’d been sitting there for two hours waiting for something to happen. A few people got into the train anyway, but I chose to head home and spend theday working from there. Luckily I have the option to connect to work remotely!
I later read that the strikes were supposed to be from 6 a.m. til 8 a.m., so if I’d hung around I may still have made it into work at some point. But by that stage all the fast trains were already delayed by two hours or more and the regional train that I would have ended up taking is the slowest of them all, so it would have taken over an hour for me to reach work even once the driver was finally allowed to set off! Working from home definitely still sounds like the better option! Hopefully tomorrow I’ll actually be able to make it into the office…
Confuzzledom 
The joys of public transport! 😦
I suppose it’s the risk you take as a commuter.
Haha I certainly would have enjoyed the free day, too 🙂 Good recovery period from St. Paddy’s Day
Well I did still have to work… just without actually being in the office 😉
curse you, deutsche bahn! They really need a competitor, maybe then they’ll find a reason to stop sucking.