TEXT OF INTERVIEW

Scott Jagow: Today, we begin a new series called My Morning Commute. People will be sharing stories about how they get to work. Our first one comes from a man who takes the train to New York. Nothing too unusual about that, except what happens on the train.

Mark Goldschmidt: Hi I’m Mark Goldschmidt, I work for Bloomberg Television and this is my morning commute.

My commute takes about an hour and 15 minutes on the train. I live in New Canaan, Connecticut, I work in Midtown, so I take the train in from New Canaan into Grand Central and I take the subway from Grand Central to 59th St.

I have to take a 6:19 a.m. train and there’s not really much you can do at 6:19 in the morning aside from either sleep or watch a movie.

None of us work anywhere near each other. I started watching movies and they were watching the movie from the seat behind me and one day just as like a joke I brought an extra set of headphones waiting for one of them to start peering over my shoulder again, which when I said ‘You want to listen?’ and rather than be insulted or laugh they said ‘Oh sure’ and they moved over and sat down and since then we’re a trio of movie viewers.

What’s nice about taking the train and watching the movie on the train is every now and then a train breaks down and you get stuck on the train and everybody groans and all it means is we actually get to finish the whole movie. We actually got through two movies one time because we were stuck on the train for like five hours in a blizzard.

My commute costs way too much. We spend $264 a month. Now that’s not bad for these guys because they get free movies for the month.

Our biggest problem now is actually finding something new to watch because after you’ve been doing this five days a week for 52 weeks a year times two years, you start running out of all the things that you wanted to see.

Now we’re heading for the subway over to the office. Usually more often than not, I don’t have a chance to finish the movie in the morning. I can’t watch it on the way home because I’ve got a different group of people watching that movie and everybody’s mad because they missed the end.

But hey we’re at work.

Jagow: My Morning Commute was produced by Sally Herships and Stephen Hoffman. We’ll have more over the next few months. So how’s your morning commute? Let us hear about it at marketplace.org. We just might come join you for the ride. In Los Angeles, I’m Scott Jagow. Thanks for listening and have a great weekend.