Waiting to Exhale...

It’s been relentlessly hot these past couple of weeks.  Wilted metrophiles everywhere are beginning to take on the hapless look of the denizens of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as day in and day out they confront the establishment in droves via the WMTA’s iron horses.  It doesn’t help that many of the wheeled wonders don’t have AC.  I don’t know which is worse, coming into an empty car in the morning or being canned like a sardine later in the day.  Either way, many of the trains evoke distinctive olfactory experiences for the attuned.  The older cars have a musty smell, the kind that results from removing previously sweaty socks that you had forgottenly stuffed in your gym shoes a while back.  And it’s not the sock smell I’m talking about, but the inside of the shoe when you finally want to wear it again.  Then you have that old carpet that didn’t quite dry completely smell that’s a little bit more on the sharp coppery side.  Either way, there’s a miraculous thing that happens every time.  Once the cars fill up with people, the original car smell disappears and then you get a waft of whatever food item your fellow passengers happen to be carrying (fresh or leftovers), or a mixture of exotic perfumes and cosmetics either people poured, laved, or scrubbed on themselves.  And of course, there’s just plain old body odor from every unique human, animal, and pest that happen to be on board with you at the time.  Needless to say, the scintillating chemistry of scents can be a wee bit overwhelming. 

Especially around flu season there won’t be a lack of signs and posters on the metro reminding people to wash their hands or cover their faces when they blow their nose.  Occasionally, you can spot interesting individuals sporting face masks while they commune with other passengers.  Realistically speaking, however, regardless of the season, traveling in enclosed, cramped quarters with a little over a million people a day will definitely either make you super immune to all sorts of critters, or the average 80-minute contact with live bodies (and I don’t only mean what’s visible to the naked eye) on the metro will eventually make even the heartiest individual sick.  A quickie solution to preventing a summer cold - there’s something to singing the Happy Birthday song while washing and soaping your hands or if you don't have time, squirt some Purell.  But don’t go overboard with the antibacterial dispensers, unless your company has an airtight contract with the vendor.