The joyride before the joyride
August 12 2010 was the first day when the KTM ETS from Ipoh to KL Sentral (even though we have Time Square that spells exactly like the one in New York but we don’t want to copy the name of the Grand Central Terminal) went into business. I felt so lucky to have the opportunity to get myself a ticket to have a joyride to KL.
I wanted to get the tickets on the 11th, 11th of August not 11th hour of the day I wanted to board the train, but I was told that I won’t be able to get it because the service has not officially started. I had no choice but to go to the Ipoh Station first thing in the morning on the 12th to get the tickets because there might be a lot of crazy fellas grabbing tickets for their virgin rides. Well, the real picture was quite different from my vivid imagination of tons of excited people swearing that the line is too long to buy tickets. There was only 3 guys lining up at ETS ticket booth with 3 counters. Technically speaking, there was no queue at all. I got my tickets within a minute.
A friend of mine was excited about the new service, he wanted to go down to KL for the weekend. So he asked me to get a ticket to KL on Friday after work and another for the first train out of KL at the wee hours of next Monday. I asked the girl behind the counter and she told me that I won’t be able to do that. No pre-booking for a high speed train (different people got different definition of speed) dubbed as “the convenient mode of transport for busy people”? But apparently, people can do that in KL Sentral… Go figure it out yourself.
So the whole process from parking outside of the train station, getting the tickets and going back to the car took approximately the time you need to cook a pack of Maggi instant noodles. And guess what? When you least expect a government servant to be efficient and hardworking, I got booked for not displaying the parking coupon on the dashboard. What a morning before the joyride.