Train Fail

Train Fail

I looked back down from the window, sighed and reached for my phone. I dialed the number for my beloved girlfriend, put the phone to my ear and waited for her to answer.

“Hello.” She answered happily.

“Hi honey. What’s the train station after ours?” I enquired; trying to sound like nothing was wrong which anyone can tell you simply makes you sound like something is wrong.

“It’s [station name]. Why?” She answered and counter questioned with a sound of child like curiosity, as if she knew my question meant that an amusing story was about to follow… I was not going to disappoint her.

“How far away would you say that is from our station?” I asked, trying to avoid her question like a game of intellectual dodge ball.

“10 minutes. Why?” Answer, counter question, giggly anticipation, direct hit.

“Wellllll…..” I added a few extra l’s to the end of the word, hoping to buy myself some time to think of the least stupid sounding way of explaining my predicament.

“…I might have just missed our station… kind of… just now.” It was the best I could come up with. I clearly should have added more l’s.

“Hehehe. Oh oh oh. How did you manage that? Did you fall asleep?” She asked. I got the impression that she was not disappointed with the level of amusement in my simple tale.

“No. I was writing a blog post and didn’t realize we had arrived at the station until we were leaving it again.”

This was true. When I had looked up from the screen of my laptop and gazed out of the window into the winter night the station on the other side of the glass had looked very familiar. The sound of the train door closing was only matched in volume by the sound of the penny dropping as I realized it was my train station, the one I should have just gotten off at. Half an hour, two trains and a phone conversation later I finally arrived home.

This is what this blog costs me occasionally; time… time and stupidity.

Stuart

Stuart is an accident prone Englishman who has been living in the Netherlands since 2001. Even his move to the country was an unintentional accident, the result of replying to a cryptic job advertisement he found one day in a local British magazine. Since then he has learned to love the Dutch (so much so that he married one of them) and now calls the country home. He started the blog Invading Holland in 2006 as a place to share his strange stories of language misunderstandings, cultural confusions and his own accident prone nature.

10 Responses

  1. tenakalaz says:

    the word MUPPET! springs to mind ;P

  2. Invader Stu says:

    Tenakalaz – And it fits very well. Still, it’s not as bad as the time I did the same thing and called you from Utrecht.

  3. zed says:

    Oh you twonk. At least you weren’t calling her from a lift….

  4. Invader Stu says:

    Then I would have really been in trouble. That lift had no phone reception :p

  5. Aledys Ver says:

    Thank God the Netherlands is a small country…. :o) What if it had been a really long blog post and you had called her from… say, Poland? :o)

  6. Invader Stu says:

    Well I have done it before and ended up in Utrecht, drunk at 2 in the morning: https://accidentallydutch.com/?cat=7&paged=6

  7. Gez says:

    Heh. I’ve done it enough times myself. Before I moved to the Netherlands, I was living a bit north from Cardiff, and working in a casino in town. That meant night shifts. Which finished at anywhere between 2-4am, depending on the shift. So work was followed by a few hours nap in a cold waiting room on Cardiff Central, waiting for the first train home at just after 6am. Normally, I’d be awake to get the train, then occasionally doze off on the train, and miss my stop by one station (once I made it 2 stations along). But once I remember waking up in the waiting room just as I hear the beeping as the doors were about to close – the train was about to leave, without me on it! What didn’t help was I’d slept funnny, so had a dead leg, making the subsequent run for the train more of a crippled waddle aided by a wall. By now the train’s already leaving the platform, and it’s then I see the time, and the train leaving isn’t mine – but one ten minutes AFTER mine’s already left…..

  8. Invader Stu says:

    Gez – I should not laugh but I think your story just beat mine. Hehe.

  9. Anita says:

    Ach, we live such busy lives ! I wonder why it didn’t happen to me more frequently. Instead of Zaandam I’ve got out in Hoorn and another time in Alkmaar. Hungry and tired and desperate to go home and instead I had to contemplate so many fields and sheeps….

  10. Invader Stu says:

    Anita – It’s annoying when that happens isn’t it. you just want to get home but suddenly it takes longer.

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