Penn Station in NYC is a spread out, kind-of-convoluted place. There are very few places to sit- I assume by design. I was picking up my train at 3:15 in the morning to head back from a social media club meeting that I had gone to, and honestly? I needed to sit down.

I wandered around for a while, then noticed a waiting area for Amtrak ticket holders only. I scrounged around and found my ticket, was screened by the person sitting at the desk, and found my way over to an outlet so I could charge my needy little iPhone. That thing demands to be fed more often than any of my babies ever did.

So I was parked on the floor next to the electrical outlet poking around on twitter when two women came in, obviously in official capacity. One was dressed in a uniform, and the other had a shirt or something emblazoned with the word AMTRAK, in case you were wondering who she worked for. They walked over to a gentleman who was sitting in one of the seats and asked him if he had a train ticket.

Here's where it starts getting theatre-of-the-absurd. The man said that, indeed, he was in possession of a ticket, and was asked to produce it. He began rummaging around in his bag- but he obviously didn't have a ticket, and never had. Had he somehow expected one to materialize at the bottom of his rucksack? He scrambled around for a good five minutes until he was removed- politely, I will add- from the seats area to the standing-room-only section.

Why would someone keep looking for a ticket that never existed?

And maybe generally- why do people keep doing the same unproductive behaviors over and over in hopes of coming across that invisible ticket? I feel like you see this all of the time in Real Estate; just check the classified section of the newspaper under houses for sale. Or they insist on using a hard-sell approach when what is really needed is for the agent to be a trusted advisor. Or they live with an archaic brokerage structure.

Why waste your time looking for that ticket?