The Abominable Train

The Abominable Train
By Margriet Hesseling and Marloes Konterman

There once was a train known for it’s excellence in keeping time. Unlike the other ICE trains that ran in that day and age, this train had showed up on time, and repeatedly did so. In fact, it had never been late to an appointment. It was actually so accurate that it was known by the name: MEL. Most Efficient Locomotive. It was so efficient, that while being on time, it also managed to be comfortable, safe, carry a maximum capacity, and not smell as bad as the others. It had a special air filter built in that offered passengers the scent of roses.
Unfortunately, its competitor, Other Train, as it was called, had an even more special quality to it. It could read minds and offer people whatever food they wanted in at any point in time. Rice? Sure! Macaroni and Cheese? They had it! Boerenkool with potatoes, sausage, onions, extra extra extra crispy bacon, and of course hamburger meat charred to the bone, because Josh Lyman loved it that way. MEL could not compete with that.
One evening, at quarter past seven, as MEL was just passing the Ajax Stadium also known as the Arena or flying saucer- not to mention the home of both Ajax and the GoAhead Eagles- two nitwitted dumb twenty-something year olds sat and thought about how to improve MEL in order to once again beat it’s competition Other Train. They hadn’t gotten many ideas yet, in fact none-at-all. It so happened, that they couldn’t seem to even form a coherent thought as one of them was lacking sleep and the other thought she might be high on life and probably still basking in the win of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
All of a sudden though, the blond girl had an idea. Which was of course very extraordinary seeing that she was blond (and we all know what they say about blonds). The idea though, was quite spectacular. So spectacular if truth be told that the brunette flopped back into the chair, this was in a reclining position, in surprise and awe. The idea was to look around the train and interview customers, because the customer knows best and is king. So, the brunette made an excel sheet with some questions. It looked much like this:

Wat du jo like about this train?
Wat du jo not like about this train?
Wat wood jo like 2 chang?

Now they wanted to print, but they had no printer. So, they decided to just go around asking the questions. They were too stupid to even grasp the concept of writing the questions down on a piece of paper and distribute them that way, or even keep it as a queue card or cheat sheet.
The problem was that when they finally got around to asking people the questions, they seemed to forget what they were going to ask. Also, the answers kept slipping their minds. Thus, the questionnaire was useless.
Then they had a revelation! They kept forgetting. Perhaps the trick to it was to have passengers forget what they did on the train, therefore never realizing that the train wasn’t better than another. To justify this kind of brainwashing they argued that the passengers would enter the train and no time would pass with boredom when they got off.
They’d accidentally stumbled on the idea of cryogenically freezing passengers without knowing it, and won the Nobel Prize for physics that same year. Realizing that they weren’t as stupid as they thought they ran for Prime Minister and Secretary General of the UN and won, causing mass hysteria and a global economic crisis that would last into the next ice age. Luckily they had their cryogenic freezing techniques and were able to get away and frozen before the mass mobs attacked and killed them both.

Epilogue

The blond was released from freezing too early and instead of getting stupider as was hypothesized to, landed up getting one of the highest IQs ever recorded and spent the rest of her day in a mental facility trying to solve the problem of the circle.

The brunette woke up on time, and realized in the year 2591 that men had become dogs and women had become kangaroos and that there was no baseball, puzzles and ice hockey anymore and in a fit of depression learned to groom cats and mice properly.

Other Train was pulled out of commission a year after its creation, when it was discovered that the food created was being made out of a new type of polymer highly toxic for people.

And as for MEL, MEL was replaced by the MEL 2200, which included the cryogenic freezing as an option. It remained a big hit though due to the rose scented air.

END