“I thought only one single lane was going to be closed so I figured it would be running less frequently, but I didn’t think it was totally shut down,” she said.

She had no more time to talk, she said as she started to rush out of the station. She had phone calls to make, plans to rejigger.

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“My mind is blocked,” she said, her eyes betraying her expression of shock.

For infrequent riders like Khaled Orebur, Wednesday’s closure also came as a shock.

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Orebur looked despondent and confused when he arrived at the Vienna Metro station at 6 a.m. and was turned away at the fare gates by the station manager.

He had planned to take Metro to Union Station and had already purchased advance bus tickets to New York to visit friends.

“I won’t be able to catch the bus,” he said. “I’ll have to cancel the trip.”

And then there was Trevor Maurer.

The 28-year-old bopped into a nearly deserted Shady Grove station just after 10 a.m. Wednesday and stopped dead in his tracks. His orange head phones dropped out of his ears and nearly fell to the ground as he stared at the closed sign above in disbelief.

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“My heart sunk and then I got really nervous,” said Maurer, who lives in Gaithersburg and works as a waiter at a country club restaurant in Bethesda. “How am I getting into work.”

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When Maurer rode the Metro on Monday, he didn’t see any postings about a closure. And while he believes in safety he said he really wishes Metro officials “got the word out to everybody a little bit better than they did.”

“I don’t regularly check the website and I assumed on a nice day like today there’s no reason to check it for weather outages or anything,” he said.

Maurer takes the Metro pretty much every day. But he was off yesterday, so he didn’t ride.

And he won’t be riding today.