Monday, October 16, 2006  

An Open Letter to Orange Line Employees

Let's cut to the chase: if any of you had even a shred of professional pride, you would immediately hang yourselves - if you could possibly find rope with the tensile strength to support your flabby, useless asses long enough to do the job.

Delays happen. Reasonable people know this. Trains are made of metal and run by men, and both are far from perfection. But every day? Every goddamn day? That's good, old-fashioned shitty work, that's what that is. I don't know what a "switching problem" is - I'm guessing it has something to do with a switch - but fix it. Put down the Dunkins with the extra/extra and fix the fucking thing.

And please at least realize that trains are supposed to run on a timetable. There's nothing worse than being delayed for twenty or thirty minutes and having some triple-chinned hosebag in an untucked T uniform answer all complaints with, "Whattaya want ME to do about it?"

What do I want you to do about it? I want you to tuck in your shirt, zip up your fly, and take some personal pride in not being a crumb-flaked shitbird.

I swear - one time, coming home from a wretched show at a wretched little club near the Common, I catch the last Orange Line train outbound, which is not at all unlike catching the last chopper out of Saigon. We go from Chinatown to Downtown Crossing, and stop. The doors open, and we sit there. And sit there. And sit there. Finally, being a brave soul, I venture out to the platform, and find the driver sitting there, reading an issue of Ebony magazine, with his feet literally propped up on his little cubby hole windowsill. I ask him if we'll be going soon, and he rolls his eyes and exchanges glances with a T "cop" on the platform, like I was an asshole for believing that a thirty-minute delay was perhaps excessive.

Turns out thirty minutes was a bargain. We sat for over an hour, and I couldn't find a single T flunky who gave a shit. I mean, at least have the dignity to be embarrassed. Frankly, I'm as pro-union as the next guy, but if the Pinkertons ever decide to bust you guys up, I swear I'll be there early, handing out 2x4's. They won't even have to buy me lunch.

And god help us if you're running shuttle buses. It's faster to walk. No, I mean it. I could walk home faster. I mean, isn't that the absolute most basic measure of a mass transit system? That it's faster than walking? And you guys even fail by that standard.

I was watching CNN during the London subway bombing. You know what I remember most vividly? You could see, quite clearly, that even though there was thick black smoke pouring out of the Underground Station they were broadcasting from, there was a sign, a huge, full-color sign, apologizing for the delay and explaining that there'd been an attack.

Do you see what I'm getting at? Even though someone had set off a bomb, those train employees had the sense and the decency to make a sign, print a sign, and post a sign explaining what was going on to their passengers. In the middle of a terrorist attack, they did more for their customers than you lazy shitheels would do after free coffee and sandwiches on a sunny Wednesday afternoon. And hell, if someone ever did attack the T, they could blow Haymarket station right off the face of the planet, and you'd still only have that creepy old-Cylon voice annouce it as a "moderate delay."

I don't know if there's such a thing as a commuter system trade magazine, but if there is, why do I expect that Boston is the punchline to every joke? Like, if a comic ever did their convention, all he'd have to do is make sure every bit ended with "MBTA," and he'd kill.

Doesn't it get old? Aren't you ashamed? Stop eating for just a second, would you? It's gone past inconvenient - now it's just sad.

And the new turnstiles suck, too.

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