Clueless

Yesterday, the PA at Wyandanch was visited by an informative loon.

He announced as follows: The train due to depart Ronkonkoma at 7:40, Central Islip at 7:41, Brentwood at 7:51, Deer Park at 7:56, Wyandanch at 8:01, Farmingdale at 8:07, Bethpage at 8:12, Hicksville at 8:19, Mineola at 8:27, Jamaica at 8:43, East New York at 8:50, Nostrand Avenue at 8:55 and arriving at Flatbush Avenue at 9:01 is running with fewer cars. Walk up to the middle of the platform blahblahdribbledrool...

It was then 7:55 am. The train had presumably already left Ronkonkoma, Central Islip and Brentwood, and had already demonstrated not only that it was a short train, but more usefully just how much shorter the damn thing was - a statistic in conspicuous absence from the blither we had just been exposed to.

Between 7:55 and 8:55 there are numerous trains originating from other stations that pass through Hicksville, Mineola et al. No-one on the platforms of stations west of Hicksville were likely to care a jot about this message, especially (and this is a crucial point) since the chances of them standing on the platform that much ahead of the scheduled arrival of the train in question when they could be home in bed or having coffee in comfort were as close to zero as to be indistiguishable for all practical purposes (The actual chance requires the use of esoteric mathematical notation normally reserved for quoting the diameter of quarks and hence not meaningful to anyone not possessed of electron microscope eyeballs).

I mean, seriously, who plans this sort of infodump into empty air for Azathoth's sake?