A Funny Thing Happened On The Way...

"A funny thing happened on the way to the office..."

So today I pulled together my recently acquired passport photos and documents and off I went to the Passport office. I don't need a passport for any particular reason since I have no trips planned overseas but I wanted to get this done sometime. The office opens at 8:45 am so I was aiming to arrive there at 8:30 am.

I arrived at the intersection of Colborne and Horton at 8:30 am, so my timing was good. I couldn't find the building at first so I had to make a couple of turns and go around a couple of parking lots to get my bearings. In the meantime, a train crossed Colborne Street just a little north of my location and all of the early morning traffic got stuck. I was glad that I wasn't trapped in that queue.

Ah, but then I realized that I was mistaken and I wasn't looking for Colborne and Horton. I was suppoed to be looking for Colborne and York, which was two blocks north. Just across the train tracks. The jokes's on me, right? Wait! The train just finished passing and the road re-opened as I pulled another U-turn. Excellent.

I finally got back onto Colborne and started to head north and...bam! The warning lights at the track descended again as a second train came roaring through. Ah, the irony of it all. I couldn't help but laugh at myself and my poor timing as I parked and waited. Sure, I could have pulled yet another U-turn there and gone one block west to the tunnel on the parallel road that bypasses the tracks. I guessed that the time that it would take for this train to pass, though, would be about the same as taking the detour.

My prediction was correct and less than a minute later, the train had gone through. An odd thing happened, though. The warning lights at the track continued flashing and the crossing rails at the track remained down. Did they fail to trigger and turn off? I've had that happen to me before and I've seen tracks blocked for a half hour with no train traffic at all.

Nope, that wasn't the case. Everything was proven to be working successfully because less than thirty seconds later another train - the third one in five minutes - slowly started to pull through the intersection. Hilarious! At this point, half of the cars that were on the road pulled U-turns and headed for the detour. I was enjoying the joke, however, so I patiently sat there. After all, it would only be another two or three minutes and I wasn't in a rush.

So I'm sitting there looking at the passing graffiti cars and then this lineup of metal starts to slow down. How odd. Maybe there's another intersection further west for which the train had to be cautious. As I continued to watch, the train comes to a complete stop. And not only that, but the train starts to go into reverse, ever so slowly! I thought that my eyes were playing tricks on me but no, there was the train backing up from whence it came.

Laughing, I watched as the train backed up from its (presumed) middle point and went back to the quarter point. It sat there for a while, at which point I pulled out my book and started reading. There were some other suckers still parked on the road with me but most of them were company vehicles, so I presume that they were getting paid to sit there.

At long last, the train did pull away after sitting there for another five minutes. The flashing lights stopped, the crossing bars went up, cars started their engines and away I went, one whole block north. I spent an inordinate amount of time finding a parking space, went into the government offices and proceeded to spend another forty minutes waiting in their inefficient queues.

All told, I spent a full half hour waiting at that train crossing. I was given three or four conveniant opportunities to turn around and head for the detour, and many of my compatriots did just that. I'm me, though. No excuses or explanations are required beyond that. The irony and humour of sitting there was just delicious, and so I sat there and composed this story in my head while I giggled randomly to myself.

All things being equal, I will always take the funniest option. Don't ask for whom the bell tolls, those bells tolled for me. And now I've tolled you.