I’d like to talk about a rather stressful journey I had to make about two years ago, right in the middle of the morning rush hour. I was living on the outskirts of Manchester at the time and had been invited for a second-round job interview in the city centre at nine o'clock on a Monday morning. Naturally, that meant I had to commute during the most chaotic period of the day.
I decided to take the commuter train because driving and finding parking would have been an absolute nightmare. When I arrived at the local station around quarter past eight, the platform was already packed to the brim with office workers and university students. As the train pulled in, it was clear there were hardly any seats left, so everyone basically had to squeeze into the carriages shoulder-to-shoulder.
To make matters worse, the train ground to a halt between stations for nearly twenty minutes due to a minor signalling fault. Being wedged by the doors with no air conditioning on a warm morning was intensely uncomfortable. I remember checking my watch every two minutes, feeling this rising sense of panic that I was going to ruin my chances of landing the job before I’d even arrived.
In the end, I managed to sprint from the main terminal and reached the office building with barely three minutes to spare. Although the interview actually went quite well, I felt completely drained and flustered for the first quarter of an hour. The whole ordeal really made me appreciate just how exhausting a daily peak-hour commute can be on your mental wellbeing.