Learned something important this morning… When buying tickets for the MAX train with a credit card, make sure you put the card in the correct way. I initially started to put my card in the wrong way, then put it in the right way, but the damage had already been done. Apparently the Ticket Dispensers are rigged with an alarm that is set to go off if something that does not feel like a credit card inserted the correct way is inserted into the credit card slot. (Catch all that?) So while I was finishing my transaction this gawdawful high pitched alarm was going off. On top of that the ticket validator was not taking tickets because someone had jammed something in the slot. (Maybe they should put alarms on those.) And the MAX train was pulling up. I grabbed my tickets and receipt, dashed onto the train just before the doors closed, and sat there as the train went nowhere. After a couple minutes of silence, except for everyone’s internal question of “Why won’t the train move?”, the train proceeded to the next stop, where we were informed that we would be taken by bus across the river, as they were working on the line that day. A guy with a megaphone who sounded an awful lot like the recorded announcer on the Monorail line at Disneyland directed us to get onto the shuttle busses. Did they hire him just for his voice? Or was it just fortuitous that they had hired an employee with an announcing voice? We may never know. I wound up walking a few extra blocks in the rain to get to work, but I had my super-spiffy faux snakeskin rainhat on, so it was okay.