Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Charlie has infected the MBTA to the point where they are now refusing to sell T tokens—as if the Charlified subway stations were the only places tokens came in handy. There are plenty of situations where it’s easier to use a token ($1.25 at the size of a pfennig, as discovered by an exchange student who dropped the latter into turnstiles until she got caught), for example when you need to get $1.25 into a Charlie card reader on an overpriced bus with no Charlie ticket-selling machines for miles around—one coin at a time, because the slot only takes one coin at a time.

That’s what I used tokens for until they stopped selling them to me at Government Center. Despite their party over the last token, they haven’t actually installed any vending machines there yet, and the Charlie-style turnstiles aren’t plugged in for some unknown reason. So you have to pay them in cash (or tokens, if you stocked up) if you don’t have a pass. Charile only knows what they do to commuters who actually have CharlieCards or non-pass CharlieTickets.

Probably they wave them through. Fare collection is at an all-time low across the system. Of course it’s always been nominal on the Green Line, but I’ve only paid in full for about half my pricey bus rides to the ‘burbs this month. Mostly the driver waved us past Charlie because he’s slower than a traffic jam on 93 (when he’s not completely toast from the Rainbow Screen of Death).

Then there’s this one driver who never sets the machine to the right price, so I’ve gotten a few 25 or 35 cent bonuses on those runs. He even tried to give me a 35 cent CharileTicket as a refund for my last token. I looked at the poor guy like he was trying to sell me a squid. What would I do with it? Save up four of them and run them through Charlie one at a time? The other commuters would lynch me.

I could spend all of November just researching my NaNo novel, and now that I’ve discovered the Boston Public Library has online JSTOR access I may do just that. I think JSTOR will let you search and read the first page of articles even without access.

And yes, I really do need to know about A Sequence of Vowel Shifts in Phoenician and Other Languages in order to meet today’s NaNo quota. Really.

I followed a NaNo forum post to this article on inventing your own naming language, and discovered to my surprise that the origin of the name “Boston” is Botwulf’s Stone. Who knew?

It was a windy day today in America’s windiest major city, as I waited half an hour for the bus to the suburbs. I was the only one at the stop for a while, which normally would mean I’d missed the bus, but in this case meant that the bus was so behind schedule that my fellow 8:45am commuters had caught the 8:10 sometime around 8:40, leaving us suckers who show up at 8:43 in the lurch.

When the bus finally arrived, the bus driver told us (me and some serious stragglers) what went so horribly wrong: the new CharlieCard machines have been installed on my bus route.  Now I’ve seen the dread beasties on the occasional 66, but I figured my bus had far too high a number to get Charlie’s attention so soon.

But I guess it’s not so soon anymore.  The new fare machines were so much more trouble for everyone to use, from the driver to those of us with passes holepunched onto our keychains to the poor low-tech slobs passing three dollars and change into the dollar-sucker every day, that the cumulative delay of rush hour added up to half an hour.

Keep in mind that the full trip to the far corner of the burbs takes 45 minutes (fortunately I don’t have to go that far), so the half-hour late bus I stepped onto could only have been on its fourth run or so of the day. In addition, the burb-ward morning runs are relatively underpopulated compared to the full buses coming into the city, and sometimes the bus just goes back empty and out-of-service for another burb-to-Boston run instead.

I live in fear of the day Charlie comes to the green line trolleys.

As I like to point out, when pedestrians cross the T, the train wins. When large vehicles cross the commuter rail, however, it’s usually a draw, as in yesterday’s commuter rail crash. A train on the Franklin commuter rail line hit a stone crusher atop a flatbed truck that was stuck on the tracks. The train was a total wreck, and reports of injuries vary between 17 and 19 commuters, none killed.

The truck driver was outside the truck waving frantically at the train when the accident occurred and was uninjured.  The state of the stone crusher is unknown.

So I foolishly went to Brookline Village this morning around 9am to run errands, thinking it’s past rush hour and the D line is fast so I can’t possibly miss my connection downtown. It’s not like two trees were going to fall on the D line in the space of a week, was it? Was it?

Well, somehow I’m always around for these things. I strolled down to the Brookline Village stop, but it was crawling with T workers. Any time you see a live T worker (as opposed to a CharlieCard machine) these days it’s a bad sign. The more T workers, the worse the situation is going to be.

I kept strolling towards the station though, because although there were two trains parked on the outbound track, the inbound track was clear and I was headed inbound. A T worker swiftly disabused me of my illusions of mass transit. He said there was a police action at Beaconsfield (two stops outbound) and the D line would be out of service for an hour. Go catch a bus to the C line, he added.

I was tempted to wait around and see if an inbound train came anyway, because T workers don’t necessarily know when the trains run or where the busses stop (even if they’re driving them at the time). This one seemed to think the 60 goes to the C line, when it actually goes to Kenmore. In fact, the comments at Bad Transit reveal that at least one inbound train in fact did come through Brookline Village, but at that point every police siren in Brookline was wailing its way Beaconsfield-ward and I figured the D line was really out of commission for the time being.

Fortunately I have a clue and I not only know which bus really goes to the C line but also which one is most likely to show up long after rush hour. I was already hosed as far as making my connection downtown went—the T stops for no man—but I gave it a shot anyway.

There were some very confused folks right behind me (perhaps refugees from the parked trains) as I was walking to the 66 stop who later tried to explain to the bus driver about the police action at Beaconsfield and that they’d already paid (quite a bit—the D line costs more than the regular subway, never mind a bus). He said he hadn’t heard about it, but he let them on the bus for free anyway. I asked the driver to announce the Coolidge Corner stop for them, since they didn’t seem to know the C line from the commuter rail. In that helpful MBTA way, he didn’t, but they managed to follow the more clueful commuters off the bus. The last I saw of them they were headed for the outbound platform; I certainly hope they meant to go outbound.

Of course I missed my connection (the legendary bus to the ‘burbs that runs once every hour and a half) and hours later when I finally got to work we speculated in vain about the police action. I googled it tonight, and according to the Brookline TAB it was a “bogus bomb scare” reported by a guy who thought his luggage was vibrating. I’m sure it was, along with everything else on the train, until he brought all D line service to a screeching halt for half the morning. (The article says it happened at 10am but I heard the sirens and got turned away from Brookline Village at 9:45 already. Some BadTransitters report even earlier times.)

I wonder how many more major incidents the D line will have this month—or this week.

I was on the D line Thursday, but I managed to avoid being hit by the tree. I didn’t even hear about it until my mother asked me whether I was hit by the tree. I did hear about the drunken college student who hit a pole at Warren Street on the B line, left his two passengers in the burning car—which later exploded, fortunately after some non-drunken person or persons had rescued the passengers—and thus took the B line out for a while this weekend. Of course this is all hearsay from reading the ever-informative Metro this morning, so my details may be off. In particular, I’m not certain that the car exploded.

This morning we were moving in fits and starts from the time the train went underground until we reached Government Center. I was late for my bus, but fortunately my bus was late as well.

Lately I’ve noticed that that old T cliche, “shuttle buses are on the way,” has been replaced by a newer, more honest line: “the best way to get there is to walk.”

Last Wednesday night (during rush hour, of course), a disabled train or electrical problems (I heard rumors of both) brought all Green Line service at Government Center to a screeching halt. Cops were everywhere, police tape roped off the westbound track, and the eastbound track (to Lechmere) was being used to run an extra-long shuttle train between Gov’t Center and Park Street.

Anyone actually headed to Lechmere was, as they say, SOL. So the cops were actually telling people to go back outside, walk to Haymarket, and catch an eastbound train there. The weather wasn’t bad, for February, and riding a shuttle between Gov’t Center and Haymarket would take longer than the walk.

Today, however was different. As usual, I crawled out of bed and got onto the Green Line. We made it about as far as Pleasant St. before the conductor announced there was a disabled train in front of us and we’d be moving again in a few minutes. This was already the kiss of commuter death for me, since any delay on the Green Line means I miss my connection downtown and get to wait an hour and half for the next bus to the ‘burbs.

We stood there for a while, then moved a few stops. We gave up the ghost at BU East, moving only to cross the street to the actual platform (and not all the way onto the platform, so that we could only use the front door of the second car to get out). Eventually, after a total delay of about a half-hour, the conductor said the train was going out of service, and tossed off that wonderful line about the best way to get downtown being to walk to Kenmore and catch something there.

Which, on a nice spring day, it might be. The day after 17 inches of snow fell on the city, walking from BU to Kenmore was more of a slushy, slippery challenge. (Of course it was nothing compared to the ‘burbs, where it snows more and no one bothers to shovel the sidewalks.) You’d think with half an hour to work on it, the MBTA could have produced some shuttle buses, but no. Pedestrian power is the new T motto.

I got downtown three-quarters of an hour late, leaving me only three-quarters of an hour for breakfast before the next ‘burb bus. All in all, it was a pretty average day on the T.

I opened my curtains sometime after lunch, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but snow. Big, fluffy flakes in October, that went on all afternoon and may still be falling now for all I know. (It’s dark.)

This is, as the woolly mammoths said right before they froze solid with the contents of their stomachs still undigested, a bad sign.

I was introduced to the Sudoku fad through the ever-disposable Metro, the newspaper of choice for Boston commuters. But you can also play on the web.