Straight out of college, I went on a summer backpacking trip to Europe. Well, it wasn’t exactly a backpacking trip, as (1) my bag wasn’t a backpack, and (2) I actually spent two months in one place attending a language program, but that’s another story.

My ticket back home was out of London’s Heathrow airport, and since I was in Bavaria at the time, I had a major train + ferry + train journey just to get my flight. I had the journey carefully researched and perfectly timed so that I’d be on the ferry just as my rail pass expired. The journey, though long, was largely without incident, but something that happened on the tube from Liverpool Street to Heathrow left a lasting impression.

I had figured out in advance which train I needed to catch. I’ll guess now that it was the Circle Line to South Kensingon, changing to the Piccadilly Line. I followed all the signs carefully and got myself to the correct platform. I noticed that there were other lines operating on the same track, so I had to make sure that I got on the correct train.

Within a couple of minutes, a train arrived. I looked to see whether or not it was a Circle Line train, but wait. There was no marking whatsoever. No Circle Line, no Metropolitan Line, nothing. And yet, busy Londoners were getting on and off, some were waiting for a different train, and they all obviously knew something about this mystery train that I didn’t – namely what line it was running.

I finally asked a woman who was standing nearby if she could tell me what train this was. Predictably, she looked at me as if I were an idiot. She was silent for a few seconds, and then without moving her head she glanced slightly upward and answered me. “Metropolitan.” End of conversation.

You see, in New York, the line number/letter and destination are clearly visible on the outside of every subway car. In fact, everywhere I’d travelled, every bus, subway, and tram was labeled in this fasion. In New York at the time, looking at the train itself was the only way to know if it was the train you wanted; fancy platform displays were as of yet a thing of the future. It had simply never occurred to me that there was another way.

The train information signs in the London tube station were large enough to read easily but also small enough to miss completely if you didn’t know they were there. Had I gone to London with this one simple bit of information – that there is train information displayed above the platform – I could have saved myself this small embarrassment and the possibility of getting on the wrong train.

This, my friends, is an exact parallel of what’s happening in my workplace nowadays.