The Clumping of the Morons: An Informal Study in Non-strategic Thinking.

I type up a lot of stuff on the train. Blogs, essays, the book I'm working on, so I've developed a carefully vetted strategy to get the seats that are conducive to using a laptop. I won't bore you with the details. So you might think that the following might be unfair, but I don't care. The Blue Line tried its best to kill me recently, and naturally, I'm still bitter.

A Blue Line train is comprised of three cars with four evenly-spaced doors apiece. The platforms are pretty long and at most stations, they can only be entered at the ends. This causes an annoying phenomenon I like to call “The Clumping of the Morons.” See for some reason, some people - more than enough of them to make this post necessary - can't be bothered to move to the middle of the platform to get into the comparatively empty middle car. They walk onto the platform, and, apparently worn out from the effort, stand there, unable to proceed to an area of the platform that will enable them to get a seat. They then act surprised when they get on an end car and find that there are no seats. Even controlling for the 2-5 people per stop that run hard to catch the train and are forced to enter the first door they get to, that's a lot of morons that may or may not be lazy as well.

So now there are clumps of people just inside every door of the end cars, slowing everything down because people can't get their asses (a high percentage of which are spectacularly enormous) on and off the train fast enough. Some of the drivers get irritated and remind people that there are in fact 12 total doors on the train and would they mind using them all, pretty please? That just causes the people on the outside to push a bit harder to get in. I'd probably be less irritated if they'd also deign to stop bumping my laptop and reading over my shoulder. Morons.