Daily: My Commute

So I take public transportation to work now. A year ago, my complaint was that I had to sit in a car for two hours while I waited in an impossible line to get out of Chicago. On a good day it took me an hour to get to work and an hour and a half to get back home. On a bad day it took me two hours to ride 45 miles to work and three hours to travel the same distance home. All the while, the expense of owning that car was eating up more than half my paycheck.

Now I ride the train to work every day for 20 minutes. There are still the same crowds, but I have to deal with them in differently. There are trains every three minutes, but sometimes I have to wait while train after train goes by because the cars can fit only one more person.

And when I say "fit" I mean you have suck in your stomach and push someone weaker than you out of the way. You kind of have to lean your shoulders forward like a ploughman and make it very clear to others waiting that it is YOUR TURN to get on the train. Like, put your elbows out. Once I thought I was surely going to make it on this train and a woman muscled her way in front of me. I learned my lesson and have become much more aggressive. Another time I was on the train and I thought, "Man, there is no way another person could get on the train. I am the last person who could possibly squeeze on." Then right before the doors closed, a woman much smaller than me ran up, wrapped her arms around my waist and pushed me in to the Wall Made of People in front of me. She wasn't left behind to wait for the next train.

Once in the train, we all squeeze together like the Tetris blocks of an expert player and turn up our iPods to create an illusion of personal space. For the first few stops I don't have to hold on to anything because there is nowhere for me to fall when the train lurches. Plus I usually can't move my arms enough to raise them in order to grasp the handles. There are no young kids, no elderly, no homeless. There are only people wearing various work uniforms--suits mostly.

London's Underground is old and poorly ventilated, so its really hot down there. You can see the effects on men especially, as some faces sprout huge persperation beads. I usually have to take off my coat as I walk the halls during my transfer from the Northern line to the Central line, too.

A claustrophobic could not do what I do every morning. I like to think of myself as a pretty savvy city dweller, but I gotta admit--rush hour on the Underground is a tiny bit scary.

But you know what? I'm not complaining in the least. The transport is fast and cheap (about 15 pounds a week, with no chance of added expense because a steering column went out). And if I left the house 15 minutes earlier, I could opt for the bus, which is a much easier, less competative ride. It just takes longer. I always take the bus home and I never have to wait more than 15 minutes for one.

My job is going really well so far. I write for a B2B that caters to television producers and industry people. It's called Television International, and its got a daily version and a fortnightly version that is that is emailed to subscribers in pdf form.

I write stories that are interesting to me, and I get to interview people from all over the world. The other day I spoke to Singaporean government types about their latest effort to draw international television investors. In the last two weeks I've talked to reps from Singapore, England, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and The States.

My editor and I work together to get the one-page daily publication out, and we're starting to fall into a nice rhythm. I have to learn new phrases like "free-to-air" and "pay TV" and DTT and who owns who but I feel like I'm picking it up fairly well.

It's the same as a public newspaper in that I'm expected to recieve an assignment, interview the for it, and write up a few hundred words on it in, like, two or three hours.

The difference is that I only speak to professionals who deal with the press often. Sometimes it was a lot of fun talking to people in the community about their lives. But other times it sucked.

In this job, I'll never have to try to squeeze a quote out of a four-year-old that makes sense, cajole a 13-year-old into giving me his mom's cell phone number because his mom is wanted for embezzlement and isn't answering her office number, or rush watch blood drain from a car accident victim as his girlfriend screams in disbelief. I did all of those things as a newspaper reporter and won't miss them.