The past two weeks have been pretty busy for me! I've had work everyday excluding Tuesday which turned into a Ben Affleck movie day. The thing about being a CRT is that I have to get up at 6am every morning and wait for a phone call to determine the rest of my day. These past two weeks though, with the exception of two days, I've known where I am going before I wake up in the morning. Either I get a phone call the night before or the school I was at the day before asks me back for another day. It's nice to know before I go to bed where I am going the next day so that I can plan out my transportation. To toss in a fun fact, Melbourne has one of the largest rail and tram systems in the entire world! This is why it is essential to plan out where I am going.
Timing is very important when you travel using the public transportation system. In the city, it doesn't much matter if you miss a certain train because it is likely another will be departing in the next 5-8 minutes after. However, if you are out in a suburb and you miss a train, you're in a jam because the next train probably won't be for another 20-30 minutes. Early this week, I was out at a school in the Pascoe Vale suburb and since I had been at the school several times before, I knew the train left at 3:47pm and that the walk from the school to the train station took about 10 minutes. However, after school I poked around talking to some teachers and such. I finally started on my walk and realized that the train would be shortly arriving at the station. As I approached the cross walk, I saw the train pulling up to the station. I knew I could not miss that train as the next wasn't until 4:20pm. Although I would not advise this, I ran across the roadway (looking both ways of course. Here, you must look right first then left) and up into the train station. The doors were closing so I put my arm in right before they closed so that the doors would open again to let me in. My only problem, I didn't have time to swipe my MyKi card (transportation pass) but ain't nobody got time for that when your catching a train the way I did. This turned into a bigger problem then I expected as when I got back to Melbourne Central Station, I swiped my card for the gates to let me out and they wouldn't open. I went to talk to one of the guards and he said no problem and let me through. What I didn't notice was the police officer paired with a transportation officer on the other side of the gates waiting for me.
"Ma'am, Ma'am would you step aside please."
Although they were reasonable about it, I got a stern talking to about swiping my card each time. They tracked ALL of my past train swipes and realized that it was the only time I hadn't swiped on for a train. They let me go after swiping my card again and said, "There, now you've paid for the trip you just took." Little do they know that I never swipe on when I ride trams. Muahaha.
While we're on the topic of trains here, I'll take a second to tell a story about what happened last week on one of our train rides. Thankfully, Megan and I were together as we were called to the same school. Now, if you know me well, you're probably aware that I thoroughly enjoy watching the movie Con Air. At one point of the day I said to Megan, "They somehow managed to get every creep and freak in the universe onto this one plane and then somehow managed to stick us right smack in the middle." She didn't know what I was talking about as she's never watched the movie, but if you swap plane for train it somehow manages to perfectly describe the day we had.
In the morning, we ran all the way to Melbourne Central Station as we were running a smidge late and we were feeling very successful as we made it to the train platform right on time for our train! We boarded the train and it was immediately brought to our attention that there was a crazy on the train as we hear a lady yell, "Get your hands off me!" We looked and saw a large man, triple our size harassing a lady by talking right in her face and putting his hands on her to move her closer to his face. Although we avoided all eye contact, we somehow managed to attract this crazy to sit right next to us.
There was maybe twelve people on the huge train and he sat RIGHT next to us. He then proceeds to start talking right in our faces, so I ignored him by looking out the window, but he wanted to so desperately talk in my face that that made him move closer. So finally, I looked at him and gave him the attention he was trying to achieve by nodding my head and repeating "mhmm" to keep him at bay. I then looked at Megan and said, "so our stop is the next one." Although it wasn't our actual stop, we got off to avoid Mr. Crazy and switch to a different train car. As we got off he grabbed both of our legs, which was terrifying. We ran to the next car down, got on and began talking about how terrified we were of that man.
"Oh my gosh, he's coming!" Megan said only seconds after the train departed from the station. I turn around and sure enough, he's headed our way. The thing about the trains is some of them you can hop from car to car as there are doors and a small walking platforms that attach them. Now, he's already in our car, the one we just switched to to get away from him.
"Get back here!" Mr. Crazy shouted at us. We began RUNNING through the isle of the train and into the next car through the little platform that you're technically not supposed to use while the train is in motion. My hands were trembling and we were both terrified. Who knew what this guy wanted! Just before he reached us, the doors swung open and we got off that train! We waited for the next train to take us to our real stop.
You would think the story ends here. During lunch we JOKED about the crazy being on the train on our ride home. Little did we know that he would STILL be on the train and the very same car that we hopped onto at the end of the day. He saw us huddling in the back of the train, he stood up and began walking towards us. Thankfully the train stopped right then and there and we got off the train. We had to wait 20 minutes for the next train to pick us up, but it was worth not being harassed. I just felt really bad for all the other women and children on that train that he preyed on. When we got to Southern Cross Station, we reported him and they said they would look at the tapes and investigate.
We haven't seen him since.
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