Isn’t it always the case–you come back from a vacation (or, in this case, a four-day weekend) and your first commute is a nightmare–a giant f-you from the commuting gods to get you back for taking a little time off.

Indeed, I boarded at Hummerville this morning, and something was amiss. The seasoned commuter instincts kicked in just after I boarded and told me the usual array of choice seats available were taken, and I’d better claim whatever remaining vinyl real estate there was.

I’m glad I did, because there was some pretty heavy volume shuffling down the aisle, including the man who gets quite nervous when he fails to secure his private 1-3/4 seater (he looked particularly nervous this morning).

A moment later, the conductor came on the loudspeaker and told us that a third-rail problem had caused a breakdown in Valhalla, and we were down several cars from our usual eight.

We positively crawled into Valhalla, got pretty darn packed by North White, and had about a dozen people in the vestibule at White Plains.

The situation was crummy enough to make it onto the hallowed cyber-pages of the Journal News.