photo: arvindgrover

On August 8th, 2007, I woke up in Cos Cob completely prepared for a very important 10:30 meeting in Manhattan. My clothes, briefcase, and resume were laid out, the coffee pot was on auto and had already brewed my morning coffee.

I would take the train into the city and leave myself ample time to find the appointment address, deal with any building security check-in procedures, and be right on time.

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That morning we had woken up a few times previously to the sound of roaring rain, which seemed to be over. It wasn’t raining at all.

When my wife and I got to the Cos Cob station, people were walking away and generously informing one another that the train was canceled - kaput, it wasn’t running. Whhhaa? As many of you remember from that day, the flash flooding from the brief but torrential rainstorm early that morning had completely trashed the NYC transit infrastructure. In our case, the tracks were flooded in the Bronx, so there was no point in the trains leaving.

Now I was in panic mode - I don’t like showing up for first appointments with an excuse why I was late, so the wife and I got back in the car and we started driving - we should be OK - 95S wasn’t that bad it was actually just fine.

Until the Bronx.

Traffic in the Bronx came to a complete stop and go situation. People were leaving the highway to try to navigate frontage roads and side streets to avoid the mess with mixed results. The traffic continued to be backed up all the way to the FDR. Once in the city, driving was a challenge as the entire city was on foot because of the subway issues - sidewalks full of people spilled out into the streets.

When I finally located a parking garage and walked from the garage to the appointment, it had been 3 hours since we left Cos Cob. As I entered the lobby, everyone was exchanging war stories with each other on how horrible their journey to work was - didn’t matter where from - Jersey, Queens - even uptown - everyone had their own nightmare story of their own.

When the interview started, the fact that I was late was a non-issue - my interviewers were astonished I was even able to get there at all, and didn’t reschedule.

I want to hear about your August 8th Stories too - tell us all about it on our Commute Outages and Horror Stories forum.