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When the system works, I like traveling by train. It relieves me of the pesky burdens of driving - like speed limits and staying awake. It’s mostly relaxing, with a few exceptions (like people crinkling plastic wrappers at 3:00 am while trying to open a candy bar quietly), and it frees me up to pull out the old lappy and write nice things about the experience.
Oh, irony…
I’m currently on my way to Philadelphia for a conference. I was supposed to leave T-town at 11:59 last night. On the way to the station, I got a call from a friend who will be joining me at the conference tomorrow.
“Have you talked to Julie?” He asked. Julie, for those of you who haven’t been acquainted with her, is Amtrak’s automated attendant. She’s supposed to be friendly, pleasant and helpful. Mostly, she is. It’s not her voice - they found a woman with a calming and informal tone to record the script - but there’s something off-putting about Julie.
Consider a situation:
You’re sitting in a bar at midnight, your luggage scattered around you. You came here after checking out of your hotel because there wasn’t anywhere else to go. Your train is scheduled to arrive just before closing, and you need to know if your train is on time. You call Julie. “Hi. I’m Julie. Let’s get started. Please enter your train number. I heard 23, is that correct? (pause) That train is currently [spliced together recordings] Three. Hours. Forty. Seven. Minutes. Late.” She informs you, pleasantly, that you will have to schlep your baggage down to the station in, say, Fargo, and sit there for three hours waiting for your train. At that point, the last thing you want is a friendly voice.
Friendly, at that point, just sounds smug. You don’t want friendly. Most of us, at that point, would like someone to share our anger and disappointment with the world.
Sure, it’s not much better, but at least you would feel like there’s someone on your side as you’re standing in the station, waiting for a train that will, in all likelihood, arrive MUCH later than Julie predicts.
Back to the story -
So, you can guess what happened next. I told Roger that I hadn’t had the pleasure of talking to Julie - I assumed that the train would be relatively close to on-time, given three weeks of decent arrival-times.
“You should really talk to Julie.” He said. I knew then that he had already spoken to her and she had informed him, pleasantly, that I was going to have a bad night. It was 11:00 and my train was scheduled to leave at midnight. “Julie says it left Chicago fifteen minutes ago.” After a little mental math, I figured out that 1 hr. 15 minutes from Chicago to Toledo wasn’t going to happen. I thanked him for the info, but decided not to call Julie. Roger did a better job of breaking the news appropriately.
When I got to the station, they were predicting a 2:30 arrival time, but the nice, friendly lady at the counter told me to call around 1:00. I went home, snoozed on the couch for an hour or so, then got up and called. “Probably around 2:50 or 3:00,” she said, happily. I tried to sleep a little more but couldn’t, so I woke my wife to take me back up to the station around 2:20. When we got there, the board said 3:30.
After a few minutes, they updated it to 4:00.
So we sat there, in the ill-conceived padded bench-like seats and I tried to sleep without doing permanent nerve-damage. After a while, the conductor came around and punched our tickets (literally - it’s not a euphemism or anything).
My wife is a real trouper. She stayed there, at the station, sitting on the hideous spine-wrecking benches. She didn’t even complain
The train arrived at 4:00 like they predicted (on the fourth try) and I got aboard, sharing a seat-pair with an Asian student who was also bound for parts East. We sat down, gave each other a manly nod, then both fell asleep. I don’t think the train had even left the station yet.
We were supposed to arrive in Pittsburgh at 5:30 am and have a 2 hour layover before leaving for Philly. Again, I didn’t need Julie to tall me that an hour and a half wasn’t going to get me to Pittsburgh from Toledo. We were informed, loudly (after just over three hours of fitful sleep) that the Pennsylvanian had departed Pittsburgh on-time and that those of us bound for Philadelphia would be boarding a chartered bus to Harrisburg where the bus would CATCH UP TO THE TRAIN and let us board for the last leg of the trip.
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