I’ve been busy this week, hence the lack of posts. When I said this might happen, William Deed left a comment saying he hoped that I would come back for Standinaqueue Day.

I sorely wanted to stand in a queue (or is that standinaqueue?) and send the results to him. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to stand in a queue (true story). The only queues I was in were the ones that hurriedly form at the doors of a train as it pulls in. Sadly, nothing of note happened here.

But on Wednesday — the day before Standinaqueue Day — a girl did try to barge her way into a train before everybody (including me) had got out. She was obviously an inexperienced train boarder, so I kind of deliberately stood in her way to hint that what she was doing was wrong. Is that rude?

Trains are hotbeds of strange human behaviour, be it the man having a very loud argument with his wife on the phone, the utter arseholes who take up two seats when they’re sleeping, or the strange guy giving everybody a creepy stare (that one’s me).

Once I observed a girl who was just looking at her phone. Nothing unusual there, but all of a sudden she just burst into tears. Had she just been dumped by text? Rudeness all round!

And then there are the most annoying people of all — the people who walk up to the ticket barriers and then realise that they actually need a ticket to negotiate the barriers. Doh! Then, instead of politely walking away from the barrier, they just stop dead and proceed to fish around in their bag for their train ticket which has been lost in the luggage equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle.

The barrier is blocked by a hopeless excuse for a human being, while half a dozen slightly better excuses for human beings get held up. Some people are hurrying to get on a train you know! Have your ticket prepared before you reach the barrier. It surely can’t be difficult.

The same applies for people who are trying to enter the university library. These people are trying to get a degree, yet they seem to have trouble with the concept of not blocking the bastarding barrier while you hopelessly look for your matriculation card.

Still, I’m probably guilty of being rude on the trains myself. One time when the train was pulling into the station, the first person to walk to the door was facing the wrong way. That’s not unusual, but most people kind of realise it soon enough because there are a few tell-tale clues. Usually if you can see another track that is a pretty good clue that there won’t be space for a platform on that side of the train. And if the train has stopped and you can’t see a platform, that would usually be a cue to turn the other way.

This time, instead of the person clocking on to the fact that she was facing the wrong way, another person came up to the door and faced the wrong way, then another, then another. There were about half a dozen people standing at the door, including one person poised with his finger at the ‘open’ button.

I was a step ahead. Facing the opposite direction to everybody else, I was fixated on the open button, waiting for it to light up. The golden circle of LEDs came on and I pressed the button. I felt like shouting in a loud voice, “pwn3d!1!uno!” But the bleeping that accompanies the train doors opening was good enough. Is it wrong that I derived so much pleasure out of facing the correct way on the train?