I managed fairly successfully to avoid thinking about the threatened transit strike until yesterday afternoon. I didn’t dwell on the fact that either of the two places I would normally spend a Sunday night required a good forty minutes to an hour on at least one train in order to deposit me safely at my first final exam the following morning, but as Crispy and I watched the same footage of determined commuters and ecstatic, troll-like hoteliers looping over and over on NY1, I began to be a little concerned. The city’s contingency plans seemed awfully sketchy - livery cabs running along bus routes sounds nice until you actually start thinking about what time you’ll need to get up in order to wait for one of these things, and don’t even bother picturing an entire city’s worth of bus commuters trying to make do with cabs that can’t hold more than four people because seriously, no good can come of it.

NYU’s plan seemed just as tenuous - since Metro North and the LIRR would still be running, they explained to us, commuters would have no problem getting to Penn Station or Grand Central (apparently there are no NYU students who reside in outer boroughs). From there we were to simply hop an NYU shuttle bus to the village. Putting aside for the moment the fact that if I were in a position to get to Penn Station or Grand Central I wouldn’t need a shuttle bus, as neither one of them is too far from campus to walk, that didn’t seem to offer any new solutions.

As a last resort, NYU decided to open to commuters the Palladium Sports Center for contingency housing. As dismal as the picture of a god damned gym full of unhappy pre-finals college kids undoubtedly was, it started to seem like the safest available option as calculations for what time I’d have to get up in order to catch a cab pretending to be a bus or a bus pretending to be a subway started to result in me getting up before I’d actually go to sleep. So at around 11pm last night, I made my melancholy way back to the village while the trains were still running normally. As I walked through the Union Square station to get to the 14th St exit at around 11:30 pm, I passed an exuberant transit worker. Oblivious of or perhaps in response to my lethal stare, he stopped me, all smiles, and announced: ONLY HALF AN HOUR LEFT UNTIL WE DITCH THIS MOTHERFUCKING HOLE. The subject of my final exam this morning not withstanding, my Linguistic capabilities deserted me and I presented him with an uncouth gesture before moving on.

Eventually I got signed in and checked in and settled in at Palladium and although I’d pictured something between a snowbound airport and a homeless shelter, it really wasn’t so bad. One of the gyms had been set up as a study area with desks and chairs and that weird gym-floor smell, while the other was well removed from the rest of the facility and housed shadowy rows of really rather comfortable little beds, complete with pillows and blankets and all of the things I’d found myself wondering on the way over if I should have brought. As midnight rolled around, perhaps a dozen of us were still awake and sprawled in pajamas or reasonable facsimiles thereof around the couches in the lobby, watching the news. The whole thing was blessedly more like a slumber party than a homeless shelter, and there was juice!

Of course there wasn’t a strike, but you know if I’d decided to take my chances that there would have been.