It’s the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and most folk have already left town because nobody really lives here or has family in this hellhole of a city town.

Those of us that haven’t left yet are going to work and carrying on with the rest of our daily routine. For me, that consists of a bus, a train, another train and then another bus. It’s a fragile time-sensitive schedule that has to work together in order to get me where I need to be in a timely manner.

This morning I’m at the bus stop on time and make it to Union Station in pretty good time; there aren’t a lot of stops as there aren’t a lot of passengers to pick up or drop off along the way.

Then, at U-Stat where I’m waiting for my first train transfer, is where The Delay happens. A train is held up somewhere on the Red Line. Because the entire Metro system is run from a computer program from 1976 that uses punch cards, this means all red trains going in my direction are delayed. But the red trains running in the opposite direction are free to keep running, of course. Eight of them went by as I waited.

Almost 30 minutes later a train is coming down my track but it’s one of those hilarious pranks that Metro likes to play on passengers: it’s an empty car. Looks like it’s running fine to me, so why not make all the stops along the way? Haha, that’s a good one, Metro, happy fucksgiving to you too!

A few minutes later a train doing its actual job comes through and picks up us unfortunate work-up-until-the-holiday folk. You would think the tunnel ahead would be empty since a train hasn’t come through in half a hour save the one that was barreling through without stopping at the stations. And yet the train I’m on crawls through to the next two stops where I can transfer to my next train. Fun and not stressful at all! Thanks for the headache this morning!

Note to those attending Inauguration Day: if you can walk to The Mall in under 120 minutes, do it. You’ll get there quicker than if you took Metro. If the system’s having 30+ minutes delays on one of their lightest passenger days of the year, I fear to think what is going to happen when you add an estimated five million more people to the mix.