we're sorry for the delay

We are sorry to announce that the 7:15 train to... London King's Cross... is delayed until approximately... 8:00... due to a signal failure. We are sorry for the inconvenience caused.

inconvenience (ɪnkənˈviːnɪəns/)
The fact of being troublesome or difficult with regard to one's personal requirements or comfort.

Ah yes, how inconvenient. How very inconvenient indeed. To put this simple inconvenience into perspective let's think about some other inconvenient things. An empty tube of toothpaste. A dead lightbulb. A fire drill. A card machine without contactless. Bird shit. A spot on your forehead. Light drizzle. Forgetting your password. Needing petrol. Diarrhoea. Need I go on?

Now, National Rail, you petty fools, I would not personally apply such a passive term to such a cataclysm. Sure, you are currently thinking that relating a train delay to a large-scale and violent event in the natural world may be a tad dramatic. Well you too are petty fools and have not taken into account the domino effect that ensues once the rail announcer's sweaty finger pokes the first, delicately balanced tile over.

Your time is now. The apocalypse is now. Is cataclysm to apocalypse too big a jump for the third paragraph? I'm angry just thinking about what's coming. On a day like this the sun should fall by 10am and an emergency bank holiday should be called. I'm fuming. Let's just do it.

1. The ticket office: Now I wasn't at the Battle of the Somme, but I'm confident the scene wasn't far from this. You join the ticket queue a marathon away from the only poor sod of a machine that's decided to work today. Its comrades have pulled a sickie and fallen out of service. Train staff panic, they've never seen a delay before, and wield a brick of 90s machinery ready to churn out orange tickets to hell.
   
   One particularly purple looking worker loses all sense of customer service and gets lippy. This doesn't fly with one particularly red looking commuter, who transitions from a middle-aged father of three to William Wallace fighting the English and gives every piece of his mind before snatching his ticket and moving on. Everyone nods angrily. Have you ever tried to nod angrily? The head-rush you experience is a 'play along at home' equivalent to how this ticket office makes you feel. 


2. The platform: Death row. You march through the gates - which were open anyway making your £20 ticket largely pointless - and stride towards hope and glory. The light at the end of the tunnel. Bliss. Wrong. What meets you is a wave of slightly more organised chaos. Like prisoners of geography, commuters are confined into a thin strip of concrete by the perilous drop-off either side of them. Death surely awaits someone as perfectly functioning trains rush past by the minute. Is the guy behind you a psycho? Will he push you? Surely I'm not dying like this? The scheduling screen paints the true, LED picture of morbid reality: Delayed. Welcome to Mordor. 


3. Station announcer: Be it the aforementioned purple station worker or Alexa's neurotic cousin, the voice projected around the station was bullied at school. There's no sympathy in those undertones. They're smug. This is karma for all the times they got locked in a cupboard and got dicks drawn on their books. Sorry for the delay? More like take that you thought you were so cool in school and now look who's in charge. These people update Wikipedia pages, report YouTube comments and deny you planning permission. 


4. The Huffer: Oh boy this guy hates the world. This guy lives in a parallel universe where the hundreds around him are skipping through fields of elation and joy. This guy is the only angry man in the world. He resents everyone: you, me, David Attenborough, everyone. He wants nothing more than to let everyone know how angry he is. This train station has slept with his wife, scraped his car, and scored a 95th-minute own-goal to lose him £500. He will take any opportunity to express huffy discontent at this situation. Huff.


5. The scrum: Once the air has eroded the rock around you, a train trundles its way to a stop as if nothing has happened. It's every man for himself as school-kids exiting the train are tossed out into the oblivion. It's a no rules cage match as grown men and women rush to fill every inch of the carriage: seats, luggage racks, floor...


6. Fold-up bikes: There is always a fold-up bike and some twat who owns it. Put the lycra away Chris Froome and stop prioritising your mid-life crisis over our personal space. 


7. The scrum (cont.): You stand in a patch of real estate that would annoy a battery hen, bike pedals digging into your shins. Pure misery that can't get worse. That is until you spot him, racing towards the door from the ticket office. It's the only man who nearly missed this train, Hagrid's stunt double. This man, also seemingly an international rugby forward, causes eyes to bulge as he takes a run up. Spacial perspective is nothing to this man, as he charges in to fill the last remaining 6'7 gap that never existed in the first place. This man probably drank piss in his late teens.


8. The sitters: The Gatsby gang. Whilst you endure physical torture, they sit leisurely, occasionally flicking their eyes up from their iPad Pro or their copy of the Financial Times to judge you and your pain. You are shit on their designer Oxford shoe. AirPods in, they care not for any announcements as they don't need to get to work on time, they own the place! These are the people that will poison dinner party conversation with the explanation that paying more for a longer journey is worth it just to get a seat. Probably voted Conservative. 


9. The telephone call: Despite being stood like Han Solo's frozen corpse, somebody has found a way to get their mother/partner/friend on the phone and is treating the carriage to their unnaturally high-pitched re-counting of the morning's events. Yeah 'babe' it's been so awful please tell us more about how horrible this has been for you. By now, tensions are running high; everyone is in the crosshairs of this sniper.


10. The BO: How you smell badly at 7:30am? Do you not shower? Do you not use deodorant? Do you have no sense of smell you stinky ogre. There are year 9 boys smelling better than you after fourth period PE and you're subjecting others to your ozone layer of pong. Ignore the haters, head to Boots and pick up some Lynx Africa. This person stands close for the duration of your journey. No spray and definitely no lay.


11. The music man: Sure, it's cool when you see a Boiler Room video on Facebook and you give it large ones about what a propa norti drop the DJ produces and how you'd give a bollock to be in the mixer. Well, keep the unbearable heat and lack of any personal space in exchange for a crowd of readily furious adults that still ask how anything with an electronic beat is music. Headlining this rave is an innocent chap with liberal opinions on volume, a remixed Soundcloud playlist and some noise-leaking headphones. Rivers of bass flow out from his ears, drowning the crowd in a pool of contempt. I can't breathe but I can hear DJ Q remixing Disclosure. Rejoice.


12. The driver: The final victim is someone I feel slight sympathy for, yet after ten inconveniences already this morning thou shalt not pity no man. Throughout the stop-start journey, the crackling of the intercom puffs into life and a cheery voice apologises, tells you to move up the carriage, and tells you to go online to complain. The driver is your friendly university lecturer trying to explain why they're striking. You like them. You hate what they represent. 

You reach work. God trains were awful this morning, you say. Nobody flinches. We all go through it, they think. The PTSD is merely another inconvenience destined to fade into the hours of the working day. All will be forgotten by lunchtime and that evening you will return to the battlefield to ride the shuttle of sorrow once more. 

Has anyone given that man some Lynx?