In the nick of time, you catch the southbound 232 leaving 4th and King at 8:45 a.m., headed toward Gilroy. The gruff attendant hovers his soundless ticket scanner over your Clipper card and reluctantly waves you though. “You’re late again,” he says — a flash of recognition in his sleep-encrusted eyes.
The train’s about to pull away as you hop onto the last car. The doors shut and graze your behind. You turn around, only to spy a fellow commuter, his face fallen, through the smudged glass; he has been left behind.
It’s the smell that hits you first. That familiar, wafting scent of sweat-soaked spandex coupled with burning rubber. The bike car. A pack of the Bay Area’s finest and most fluorescently dressed cyclist-commuters, a hybrid group of Tour de France–ready computer engineers, all equipped with $3,000 bikes and outfitted in breathable neon-colored butt-pad shorts.
As you pass into the next car, you are greeted by two floors of seated commuters. The lucky, healthy and thin ones are seated in single seats on the top level, each enjoying a private window and view — except, of course, for the person in the first seat, awkwardly sitting knee to knee with a complete stranger, a woman who moments before had the nerve to ask him to remove his backpack / laptop / bottle of Soylent from the seat across so she could sit down.
On the bottom floor, the train is silent aside for the person who has just dialed into a conference call and shouts to the entire car the details of his start-up’s latest round of funding or most recent valuation. Occasionally, he will whisper into the phone, “I’m sorry, I’m on the train,” as the people around him quietly plot his untimely death.
The person wearing the giant noise-cancelling headphones thinks that because he is facing his phone toward the window, no one will notice that he is watching porn. The person sitting next to him, who can clearly see the phone’s reflection in the window, thinks otherwise.
A few rows back sits the snoring woman. Every day, like clockwork, she falls asleep somewhere between 22nd and Millbrae. Most days, she misses her stop in Redwood City. When she finally does wake up, usually around Palo Alto, she takes an uberPOOL back the other way.
You try the next car.
There is the person who live-tweets every time she sees her crush on the train. She uses the hashtag #caltrain in hopes that one day he will recognize their missed connection. But so far he has not once checked his phone in her presence.
There is the person who farts audibly, then looks around at others in a feeble attempt to pin the blame on someone else.
There is the person who sneaks onto the train without a valid fare and runs into the bathroom to hide when he sees the ticket attendant approaching.
There is the person who sneaks on the train without a valid fare and knows exactly how to sweet-talk the ticket attendant into getting a pass this time. Or he will suddenly forget how to speak English.
There is the person who forgets her presentation / purse / child on the train. By the time she realizes this, she is already outside staring at the train chugging along toward the next stop.
There are the people who shamelessly refuse to make eye contact with older and pregnant people who are glaring at them because these able bodies do not want to give up their priority seats, despite the posted signs telling them that they should.
There is the person who uses all their data Facetiming her family in another country for the entire duration of their commute.
There is the person who works furiously on his laptop, cursing to himself as he pulls SQL numbers or fills out complex Excel sheets, forgetting that he is not yet at the office.
There is the person whose expression quickly fades from glee to grief as he tries—one by one—to log on to the 30 suggested wireless networks, only to discover that none of them actually offers free WiFi.
There is the person who gushes about how great and convenient the train is to the person who regularly faces a three-hour daily commute.
There is the person whom no one else notices as she notices them.
