Commuter Column: Red Alert

Earlier this week I was met with an unfamiliar situation at the train station that bordered on the apocalyptic.

Upon pulling up, I heard an announcement on the overhead: "Please evacuate the building. Get no less than five hundred feet away from the station." I looked and saw the little old man who sells newspapers dashing away from the building. The young girls from the dry cleaners did the same thing. Commuters walked more slowly away.

"All trains have been suspended," the recording continued.

Fuck, I thought.

So I flagged down my mom and had her take me to an adjacent train station a town over. I walked into the station and asked the woman selling tickets if they had heard anything about some kind of nuclear attack or chemical bomb or whatever at my train station. I wondered if trains were still running, whether or not I'd get to the city on time.

"We haven't heard anything," she said.

Fuck, I thought.

The train came to this station, unceremoniously. It wasn't on fire, there wasn't some toxic goo dipping off of it, and as far as I can tell it wasn't attacked by a giant squid and/or Cloverfield monster.

But what, exactly, had happened? A fellow commuter hypothesized that the woman at our train station had "knocked some lever with her big butt." I thought this was a fairly plausible explanation but still needed more.

A few days later I turned on the local cable news. A story ran about the incident at my train station, what with the hurrying and the end-of-the-world loudspeaker announcements. Whatever the answer to this question, I wasn't prepared for how weird and hilarious it actually was: someone at the train station had flipped the wrong "announcement" switch. It wasn't supposed to be an announcement proclaiming the end of days. It instead was intended to be a prerecorded message reminding the Metro North commuters that the Yankee Stadium stop would be in operation today.

Of course.

Because, really, what other explanation could there have been?

I found the situation somewhat troubling. After the recent Russian subway attacks, and the heightened security within Grand Central Terminal (is that a fully automatic assault rifle or are you just happy to see me?), commuters are edgy about rail travel. But thankfully the Metro North is there to calm their worried nerves and assured them they're in the hands of professionals: by scaring the living shit out of them.