Have you ever turned up at the train station, looked up on the board and beside the train you intend to travel on, it says departing in 0 minutes? You know, and you can hear your train on the platform below, brakes screeching to a halt. You panic a little as you fumble to produce your Go Card,* push it against the reader, and wonder if it always takes this long to scan. The turnstile yields as your card finally registers, you set off in a mad dash for the top of the stairs. Now is the tricky bit, because it is a Friday and you've been drinking, the stairs are coming at you faster than you feel comfortable with. The fact that you can now hear the the train has stopped and the carriage doors are opening only serves to exacerbate the problem. You can no longer spot your footwork as the stairs merge into one indistinguishable blur. Inevitably, first one foot slips, then the other. You are no longer in control of your descent down the stairs. You are now in what some may refer to as 'a free-fall.' This is, however, short lived as you come to a sudden, bone jarring halt on the filthy tiled floor....You now realise why they call that flat spot halfway down a staircase 'the landing.'**
Author's Note: The guard must have heard me descending the stairs, because he waited for me to limp my way down the second flight of stairs, across the platform and onto train before blowing his whistle for the train to depart. Which was damn decent of him. Good form that man.
*A pay-as-you-go, touch-on-touch-off, e-ticket. Brisbane's equivalent of the London Oyster Card (I don't know what they're called in any other parts of the world).
**I didn't nail the landing.
They are called a Myki in Melbourne :P
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