Sheriff's? On the Train?

I'll preface this post by saying that I am a natural blonde. If by "blonde" you mean taupe and if by "natural" you mean fully high and low-lighted. But there you have it. Since the base color is somewhat blond-ish in nature and I was a total tow-head when I was younger I consider myself a natural.

All of that was to say that last Thursday I had an appointment to have my "blonde" touched up and to have a bit of a trim. And since out of the 3 vehicles currently residing at our home, only one works, I decided to take the train from my office in Palo Alto up to Menlo Park. Originally I had planned on walking but, y'all know... The Knee.

So I pull out my handy dandy train schedule, pick a train and walk over to the train station. As I'm making my way over to the train ticket dispenser thingy this woman walks over to me and offers me her day pass. Apparently she had no other need for it that day and as I was mildly wary at spending $2 for one stop on the train I gladly accepted it.

As I was thanking her I noticed that there were two sheriff deputies standing right there watching this whole drug-deal-looking exchange of the tickets. I thought quickly to myself, surely there is no harm in me using this ticket that someone else bought and couldn't use? I mean it would be a waste, right? But I smiled at the one closest to me and he just smiled back so I assumed everything was A-OK.

But then I started thinking... WHY are there sheriffs at the train station. Sheriffs with full on tazers and guns and walk-talkie radio things? Why? Is this a fall out from the London bombings? Do they have some reason to believe they should be at the train station right now? Seriously y'all, I was getting freaked out!

However, all they seemed to be doing was walking up and down the platform and once (unsuccessfully) trying to catch a pedestrian that was walking along the train tracks on the inside of the fence. Which along with being really stupid and dangerous, is also apparently illegal. The train before mine came and went and there was no big ruckus so I called down and decided that actually, I kind of liked having them there. They were keeping people in line. Because, y'all know, even if there are signs all over the place, there is always that one smoker who lights up right on the platform. And he's usually standing right next to me.

So I was feeling better about the whole thing really until my train came and they got on it! They were looking for someone y'all. There was lots of static back and forth on the walkie-talkies about "do we have confirmation" and such... Thank goodness I was only going one stop! I did not want to be there for whatever was going to happen. Because I've been on the train when a fight breaks out. It involves holding the train between stations until the cops can show up at the next stop to arrest the bad guys. And it takes a LONG time. I had a hair appointment to get to after all!

Then I saw this which explained so much. So perhaps my imagination was just going on over-drive and there was nothing sinister about the "confirmation" on the walkie-talkies. I'll blame it on the insomnia.