Dan's commute

I thought I'd describe how I get to and from work. (Yep, very exciting.) I typically have a 20 minute walk to Gare Centrale, one of the main Brussels train stations. Then it's a 15 or 20 minute train ride to Diegem (near the Brussels airport, just northeast of the city), and then a 10 or 15 minute walk to the TomoTherapy Brussels office. So it's a bit less than an hour one way, 2 or 3 times as long as my commute for TomoTherapy in Madison.

I don't have an electronic key to get into the Tomo building. I can buzz the Tomo reception desk, but usually I walk around back to the garage entrance. I have the code to the keypad. The keypad gives no feedback as you punch the numbers—no clicks, no lights, no button movement—but 2 seconds after I'm done the door magically opens, every time. Then I walk in the garage, the bizarre commuter who forgot to bring his car.

To get home I do the walk-train-walk thing in reverse, although there used to be a bit of a twist. When I started here a few weeks ago, Diegem tracks 1 2, and 3 were blocked due to construction, and only track 4 was accessible. My outbound train, to work in the morning, rode on track 4; and my inbound train, back home in the evening, was advertised for track 1. But I figured, with only one track accessible (track 4), I couldn't miss my train back home. Wrong! It turned out the inbound train was still operating on track 1, as usual. But pedestrian access to track 1 was at the other end of the platform, more than a quarter-mile away (I checked the distance on maps.google.com), by another track entrance I couldn't even see. When I eventually figured out to go there (by following a group of people walking there with obvious purpose), I found a whole crowd of people waiting for the train I wanted—a crowd completely invisible from the other end of the other platform. (To be more accurate, they were waiting for the train after the train I wanted, since by this time I had missed my intended train.) Fortunately, I got a grip on the situation in one day, and didn't repeat my mistake. And now, that phase of construction is complete, so I get to track 1 in the most obvious manner.