Dazed at the Railway Station

I have been participating in chess selections over the past few days to represent my company in some corporate tournament starting from next weekend. I lost my first game due to a horrible blunder in a winning position but won the rest to coast through. My second to last game was a very pretty win from the black side of a Sicilian Najdorf. I thought I would try annotating it with the help of Fritz and post it, so worked till 3 AM last night but found that I couldn’t upload the screenshots. Shit! Any ideas how I can upload screenshots pasted on MS Word to the blog? I can’t simply copy and paste the screenshot; that doesn’t work.

A call from Mum woke me up at 6.30 AM saying her train was expected to arrive at 7.30 AM and not 8.30 as informed earlier. So in a more dazed and confused state than usual, rushed to the station to find that the train was delayed due to a fire in Chennai Express, another train coming in from Chennai. And that’s the train in which I usually book her tickets when she travels on weekdays. It reaches an hour earlier and allows me to reach office on time as well. Thankfully there were no casualties on the train, though five bogies were gutted from all reports.

As the scheduled arrival time kept getting postponed every 15 minutes, I just hung around the inquiry counter and watched the fun. The girls at the counter with the mike were getting increasingly irritated with the repeated queries on Train Arrivals/Departures from a horde of people.

“Vishaka expected at 9.15, we’ll announce the platform number.”

“All local trains have been cancelled. Take the bus!”

“Charminar is delayed. No idea about the time as yet. We’ll announce it.”

“Why do you ask the same question every 5 minutes? Go stand far away and don’t come near this counter!!”

“Why are you standing here? I’ve already answered your query. Go away!”

It was real funny. The train was eventually three hours late.