The 11:23 Train (That Wasn't)

There’s something comforting about train timetables. 11:23, not 11:20 or 11:25 — as if precision itself could keep the world in order. Somewhere, someone has engineered your day down to the minute. It suggests a system designed around you, running like clockwork.

I arrived early for my 11:23 train. I didn't know if there'd be a queue for tickets. You can't buy them online for regional trains — though curiously, you can for others. The logic of which trains qualify for digital tickets and which require an in-person transaction remains one of life's small mysteries — the bureaucratic equivalent of quantum mechanics.

But I digress.

At the station, nobody knew which platform the train would use. "Usually 1 or 2," said the woman at the ticket counter, "but listen for the loudspeaker. They haven't confirmed it yet."

Fair enough.

11:23 came and went. A few of us glanced at one another, silently confirming that we hadn’t all hallucinated the timetable.

The loudspeaker crackled to life: “Do not cross the tracks. Use the stairs.”

Noted. But… which platform? And when?

“Do not cross the tracks. Use the stairs.”

Yes, received. Stairs good, tracks bad. Information… pending.

I asked again. Still no confirmation. Not of the platform. Not of the delay. Just the rules. Always the rules.

---

When Failure Becomes Routine

Here’s what that looked like on the platform:

A student staring at their watch. A man pacing, phone to ear. Someone scrolling train apps in vain. Each of us calculating whether to wait, to leave, to give up. The mental arithmetic of sunk costs and mounting losses.

I called a taxi company, and at the exact moment my client messaged: your train is delayed an hour. Amazing feat that my client knew more than the lone employee in the train station. And the loudspeaker reminded me: "Do not cross the tracks."

I went back to the ticket counter.

The woman — the only person working, managing ticket sales, helping a man who'd lost his backpack with all his documents on a train, and a growing queue of increasingly anxious travellers — kindly looked on her cell phone to consult the options I had already checked on mine. She explained my options: I could wait until 12:39, take a train to another town, then catch a connection. Or wait until 1:23 for the next direct service.

I asked for a refund. And then, because I'm apparently a glutton for administrative punishment, I asked about filing a complaint.

Out came The Book.

Carbon paper and all. Three copies, just like the old days. A beautiful relic of accountability in triplicate, destined for a file somewhere, perhaps to be read by someone, someday, or perhaps not.

---

The Precision Illusion

We live in an age of digital precision. Apps that track your food delivery to the minute. Algorithms that predict what you'll want to watch next. The promise of seamless, optimised, frictionless modern life.

And yet, you still can't buy a ticket online for certain trains. Platforms aren't confirmed until the last moment — or not at all. A loudspeaker tells you about safety protocols while offering no information about the service you’re actually trying to use.

It's performative communication. White noise. The appearance of a functioning system while the substance fails. And we consider it ‘normal’.

---

What Nobody Counts

None of this was the ticket agent's fault. She was kind, overworked, and doing her best within a system that gave her no information to share and no authority to fix anything. She was the human face of an institutional failure — the person absorbing everyone's frustration for decisions made elsewhere, by people who would never stand at that counter.

But here's what struck me as I left: the cost of this morning.

Not just my lost time — though that's real. Not just the taxi fare, or the class someone missed, or the interview that started badly because someone arrived flustered and apologetic. It's the invisible tax we all pay when systems fail routinely.

Every person on that platform lost something — momentum, opportunity, or energy spent on contingency planning instead of the work they meant to do. Trust, slowly eroded, in the basic promise that the infrastructure of daily life will function as advertised.

Most of us won't complain. We'll sigh, adjust, and move on. Because what's the alternative? Rage at someone who can't fix it? Write in a complaint book that might go nowhere?

The system isn't broken in any dramatic sense. It's just... corroded. Inefficient in small ways that compound, that ripple outward into dozens of individual lives, creating friction that no one measures and everyone absorbs.

We talk about burnout as if it’s purely personal. But much of it comes from this: the daily friction of systems that waste our time, patience, and focus, then ask us to carry on as though nothing is wrong.

---

What This Costs Us

I didn't get angry. But many would. And that rage — directed at ticket agents, at other passengers, at the unfairness of it all — is its own form of waste. Emotional energy burned with no productive outcome, relationships strained, patience depleted.

Multiply that across every delayed train, every bureaucratic loop, every system that almost works but doesn't quite. The cumulative cost is staggering, even if it never appears on any balance sheet.

Lost productivity. Missed opportunities. Decisions made in frustration rather than clarity. Frayed trust in institutions we pay for but assume won’t deliver.

And the people at the counters — the ones actually facing the public — bearing the brunt of systemic failures they didn't create and can't fix.

---

A Small Story About a Bigger Problem

This isn't really about trains.

It's about what happens when systems are designed without regard for the people who use them. When communication exists to cover liability rather than convey information. When responsibility flows down but accountability never flows up.

It's about the gap between what we're promised — precision, efficiency, seamlessness — and what we actually experience.

And it's about whether we notice. Whether we accept it as just "how things are" or whether we ask: could this be better?

I think it could.

Not through complaint books with carbon copies, as charming as they are.

But through actually designing systems that work for humans — that communicate clearly, empower the people doing the work, and don't waste everyone's time with preventable failures.

The 11:23 train never came.

But the question it left behind remains: how much of our lives are we spending waiting on platforms, listening to systems that talk but never tell? How many times do we lower our expectations, convincing ourselves that this is simply the way things must be?

These small frictions — the invisible inefficiencies eroding trust, the gap between promise and experience — are exactly what THENO exists to address: renewing our shared systems by designing better, together.