tubes under ground

I had a job interview in London last week. Rather than worrying about the interview itself, I spent my energy worrying about getting myself from the innards of Dorset into London and then across town on the tube. All the while I had to think about what the commute would be like from my future London flat to said place of potential employment. It is going to take most of forever, but it will be a step up from my current commute, which is a bear. I am not exaggerating, it is a classic pain in the ass. There are boats involved. One of them only holds about 50 cars at once and pulls itself through the water by large chains. All this, and I still worried about having to take the tube.

Here’s my biggest tip if you have never taken the London tube before: do not use a black and white computer print-out map of the tube to find your way. The colors mean something, they aren’t just some fun spaghetti rainbow. So when I was trying to figure out what stop I needed, and the polite woman stuck in the ceiling said “change here for Jubilee line”, I had ten seconds to decide what to do. I grabbed my black and white map thinking, “Jubilee. This sounds familiar. Is this actually what I need, or is it just some term that bounces around London and therefore seems vaguely useful but really isn’t. I bet it has something to do with the Queen. Better stay where I am.”

There is something about the mechanical closing of the tube doors that causes you to have the epiphany that you actually needed to get off there. Those bastards are laced with insight, and it sprays out at you right when there is definitely no getting off. So I got off a stop too late and proceeded to follow the signs to get to the other side of the tracks to go back the other way.

This is where the tube REALLY starts to mess with you. It takes so long to cross back over, and getting there is so complex, that once you end up on the other side you totally can’t tell that you’ve moved at all. I was honestly standing there looking across the track and trying to remember where the vending machines were in relation to where I was standing, and what posters were there, and I got really pissed off when I realized that everything is completely the same. I think even the people were the same. It was like that scene in “Being John Malcovitch” where John Malcovitch goes through the portal to his own brain and everyone in there has his face and all they can say is “Malcovitch” over and over.

It was a combination of that, and this (ok, ALOMST. If David Bowie were there it would have been AWESOME. But minus the stripey baby, he's just weird.)



I got there fine, all went well, blah blah. Londoners and English people in general like to bark about how unreliable the tube is. I don’t doubt that it might be questionable, but the widespread complaining about it seems to have affected the atmosphere all throughout the underground. When I was there, everything was operating normally. AND THEY WOULD NOT STOP TELLING ME THAT. I swear every ten seconds polite-trapped-in-ceiling-woman had to let us all know, “The underground system is operating a normal service on all lines.” If you listen to her closely, you can hear a proud and content tone in her voice, and it starts to worm its way into your head and you walk around feeling proud of the tube and content that it works. Not my country, not my city, and I was wandering around feeling like I was somehow responsible for the marvelousness of the system. Go me.

And you know, this is totally the equivalent of those WWII posters that were apparently in the tube everywhere back in the day. You know, KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON. I love those posters. I have one. With that woman telling everyone that the underground is functioning, London has replaced the posters with a more subtle and slightly creepier system. I say bring back the posters. They are friendly and pretty and I don’t have to wonder where my complacency comes from, I can stare it in the face.