The train screeches into the 7th Avenue station while I am descending from the street. By the time I swipe my Metrocard and take the stairs two at a time down to the platform, I hear the annoying bing-bong sound of the doors closing, and I am left standing by while the train gathers speed to the next stop. I wonder how little events could have transpired or conspired so that I would have been able to make the train. If I had made the green light at Lincoln Place on my walk to the station…If I hadn’t gotten the “too fast—swipe again at this turnstile” message (which honestly only makes me swipe faster in frustration)…If I hadn’t changed my clothes twice…This last one is less about a vain concern for my appearance and more about a subconscious ploy to procrastinate going to work.

Now that I have the time, I walk toward the back of the train. For all of the stations I frequent I am well aware of the location of the exits. If I’m going to work, I want to be at the back of the train because when I arrive at West 4th Street the stairs to the street are closest to that end. When I go to the gym, I get in the very first car with the train operator. In other cities where the trains and platforms aren’t as long, this probably is not common practice. I figure right now while I’m waiting for the next train, I’m on the MTA’s time. But when I get to West 4th Street, I’m on my clock and I don’t want to waste precious minutes walking the length of ten train cars to get to my exit.

The Q train arrives and I’m waiting for the B, so I step back to give those now running down the stairs for their train a wide berth. I have a friend from Atlanta who refused to run for the train when she was visiting. I understand this. She’s on vacation and there will be another train along in a few minutes. Though, let’s be honest, even then I have to fight the urge to sprint to the waiting train. I mean, if I can get where I’m going five minutes faster, why wouldn’t I hurry? She clucked that I had become too “New York minute,” always rushing, and I should ease my pace before I have a heart attack. This is the same person who will breakneck down I-85 twenty miles per hour above the speed limit, weaving in and out of traffic, to shave a minute off her commute. But I digress.

During the day, when trains come every few minutes, my friend’s philosophy is fine, but not at one a.m. when time between trains can be twenty to thirty minutes. Then I turn into Jackie Joyner-Kersee. I’ll hurdle garbage cans, sleeping homeless people, and small rats to be on that train before the doors close.

This has led me to another interesting point. New York’s subway is the only major subway system in the world to operate twenty-four hours a day. In more civilized places, the local government expects people to be deep into slumber by midnight when their trains stop running for the night. So when my friend refused to run for the train as the clock struck one, I knew we were in for a long wait and in terms of subway creepiness, there is a big difference between 1:00 a.m. and 1:30. Why were we even in the subway at that hour? (Note to my mother: Please stop reading here.) The answer is simple: money. At the time I was an assistant to the assistant and, weighing the fifty dollars it would have cost us to take a cab versus the then-$1.50 to ride the train, there didn’t seem to be a contest. As we walked from the train station to my apartment after 2 a.m., I could see the headline: "Foolish Women Should Have Taken Cab." (Or if it was the Post: "Hacked for 50 Smacks.")

Not long ago an eighteen-year-old girl was struck and killed by a train because she had jumped on the tracks to retrieve her new cell phone. The train operator, who watched helplessly as he saw her struggling to get back onto the platform but couldn’t stop in time, will probably be in therapy for the rest of his life, as will the two men who tried to pull her up from the tracks but instead had her ripped from their hands as the train barreled into the station. The cost of the phone? Fifty dollars. People who weren’t there shook their heads at how stupid she was to risk her life for that amount of money.

Jacquelin Cangro