More about placating the boss when the T is late

[talonvaki.livejournal.com]

I have been late - and yelled at - more times than I care to relate because of the T. Yesterday, it was "traffic." Today, a "medical emergency." These "reasons" sound ludicrous coming from the T, and believe me, it's even more suspicious sounding when I say it.

I called MBTA complaints at 617-222-5216 and spoke to Micheal. He was quite understanding and confirmed that it was not my fault that I got to work late and it was completely beyond my control. He also told me three interesting things:

1. Porter to Downtown Crossing should only take 15-20 minutes.
   
   
2. If you have your boss call the complaint number, they will vouch for your being late.
   
   
3. If you have a fax machine and call them up, they will fax you a letter explaining the delay, which your boss can frame or put into your permanent file or staple to a TPS report, or whatever.

So...they can't get you to work on time, but at least they'll try to keep you from being fired. Yay, MBTA

Comments

[autumnsshadow.livejournal.com]

good to know. thanks!

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

That's sort of useful. would be more useful if they, I dunno, ran the !$*!U@ trains on time?

[mycroft.livejournal.com]

Well, there's not too much the T can do about things like people jumping in front of trains.

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

That was one occasion, not every day. Most problems are due to poor maintenance and the like. I cut the T plenty of slack for real emergencies, but this constant dribble of delays, out of service trains and broken escalators is very frustrating.

[jmspencer.livejournal.com]

That's hardly one occasion. That is, in fact, what "medical emergency" is code for. and "switching problem" generally means power failure, as it did in Central Square the other day when everything ground to a halt for a while.

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

Often, they don't give a straight story. And medical emergency can also mean a lot of other things (the jumper I know about last week was coded "fire department activity" actually, so that doesn't mean much). I have a certain amount of sympathy because I work for the state, too, but it's a drain to have significantly delayed commutes three or more times a week, most of which are due to maintenance issues. And things have gotten much worse, at least on the davis to park st leg, in the last three to six months.

[komos.livejournal.com]

"in fact"?

Source?

[jmspencer.livejournal.com]

Source is MBTA employee. Obviously, they're not going to publish "when we say 'medical emergency' it means 'someone jumped in front of a train'."

[mycroft.livejournal.com]

I used to blame them for the escalators, but I've witnessed a few incidents, and asked some questions, that made me change my mind. It actually seems to be a regular occurance that people fall down and someone hits the emergency shutoff button, or that people drop things inside and they have to be fished out.

The poor maintenance I'm definitely pissed about -- especially in the context of spending so much money building the silver line and none upgrading and fixing problems on the red line. It's ridiculous that we allow trains to actually derail instead of replacing the worn track wholesale.

Unfortunately, the people who make the high-level budgeting decisions are political appointees, and don't even use the service.

[komos.livejournal.com]

The escalators and escalators are being serviced under a new contract that did not enforce penalties upon the contractor for failures to repair or maintain the work. That the competitive bid process did not include provisions for penalties was a measure aimed at reducing the cost of the service. It's done that, but in the aftermath, we've had to deal with outages all through the system. There are two escalators at Park Street that have been down for nearly six months now. Last night, Alewife was down three escalators and an elevator, and the escalators that were running were running in the opposite direction of prevailing traffic. If the problems were isolated, it would be one thing, but all evidence suggests otherwise.

Boston Globe, 5/15/05 (http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2005/05/15/escalators_out_of_order_at_the_ts_alewife_station/)
Patriot Ledger, 5/28/05 (http://ledger.southofboston.com/articles/2005/05/28/news/news01.txt) (http://www.mbta.com/traveling_t/transitupdates.asp)

[komos.livejournal.com]

Elevators and escalators, rather.

[csbermack.livejournal.com]

Is that time from when you walk onto the porter station platform, or from when you get on the train at porter?

[talonvaki.livejournal.com]

I'm assuming train time. What he said was, basically, being on the platform at 8:30 should be enough time to get to work by 9.

[androidqueen.livejournal.com]

heh. because i don't think i've ever seen the train get from porter to downtown xing in 15 minutes. i don't think i've ever seen the train get from porter to *kendall* in 15 minutes.

[cos]

Porter to Kendall usually takes about 6-8 minutes in my experience (once you're on the train), sometimes longer. Porter to Downtown in my experience is about a 15 minute ride. Everything is a bit slower at peak hours because it's more likely that your train has to wait for another one ahead of it, but even so, longer than 20 minutes to get from Porter to Downtown Crossing is an unusual delay. I actually have timed these rides a lot over the years.

[talonvaki.livejournal.com]

Indeed.
I used to have to be in at 8:30.

I would leave my house at 7:55 (it takes 5-8 minutes depending on that stupid crossing at Somerville Ave.) and be on time to work.

Now, I start at 9. I leave my house from 8:15-8:20 and I am at least 5 minutes late. Today it was 16 minutes.

So yeah. It's gotten a lot worse lately.

[enochs-fable.livejournal.com]

I can't imagine anyone in Boston not being understanding about T-delays, but I suppose if you're always driving it's less immediate.

[talonvaki.livejournal.com]

Seriously.

He lives in the South End. Gee, I wish I could walk to work, too.

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

There's a rule that says "the business is always located conveniently to the boss's house."

"Medical emergency" is usually code for "jumper". Or maybe that's just my inner New Yorker coming to the surface.

[danger-chick.livejournal.com]

On occasion there are other types of medical emergencies, like the woman who gave birth on the T last year.

[on-reserve.livejournal.com]

The rule can be augmented to:

"The boss lives relatively far in a bedroom suburban community but has a company-paid parking spot in the downtown office building so she never has to worry about such things."

[komos.livejournal.com]

I'm going to ask you the same question I did above... source?

[jmspencer.livejournal.com]

And I'm going to point out the same thing I did above: that you can't expect a documented source on an MBTA euphamism for "Suicide Attempt".

[komos.livejournal.com]

So some guy in an orange vest said something off the record? That's not exactly hard evidence.

I've personally been witness to a half-dozen different types of medical emergencies on the train, ranging from nosebleed to seizure. I've seen a jumper exactly once. This isn't to say that jumpers are so isolated as to be negligible. On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that the term medical emergency means in fact that there's been a jumper.

[jmspencer.livejournal.com]

No, some guy in an orange vest did not say something off the record. Some guy who I trust who has been an inspector for the T for the last 30 years did say something off the record.

And I'm sorry, I didn't realize we were playing the semantic game of strict and literal inpretation when the meaning of the sentence should be obvious. Since we're doing that, I'll restate:

According to a reliable source within the MBTA, when the train is delayed for a significant amount of time and the reason is given as "medical emergency" (or, occasionally, "fire department activity") the problem is more often than not a jumper. This is most likely to be the case when trains stop running altogether and passengers are diverted to shuttle busses.

[komos.livejournal.com]

You made a statement of fact. I just asked for a source.

[androidqueen.livejournal.com]

i've also heard of heart attacks being fairly common during the winter time.

[komos.livejournal.com]

He's got an inside source.

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

Whenever i've heard about significant delays due to a "medical emergency", it's because someone either fell or jumped in front of a train.

What other kind of "medical emergency" warrants a thorough stoppage of service and re-routing of trains? If someone has a medical emergency on board a train, call for help by radio, hold the train at the next station, wait a few minutes for an ambulance to show up, get him off of there, and send the train on its way. A handful of trains get delayed in the middle of the day. A medical emergency on the platform can be dealt with by getting the lookie-lous out of the immediate area and getting the patient out of there on a stretcher. No need to disrupt service at all. Not long ago some guy fell down an escalator and couldn't get up. No biggie, an ambulance got called and people just walked around him. (MBTA personnel were at his side to make sure he would be OK.)

[komos.livejournal.com]

Any medical emergency that occurs on a train will result in just that. The patient will be stabilized and removed from the system prior to the the train moving again. In some cases, this will take a few minutes. In others - heart-attack with defib, for instance - the process can take significantly longer. This doesn't even take into account the delays that will be cause simply by disrupting the flow of traffic for x amount of time.

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

Thanks, that's helpful. I've been hauled into the office on more than a few occasions because of this. Luckily it's a huge company, so on any delayed train there are always a few others from my company and we can dash in late together.

[darxus.livejournal.com]

"...or staple to a TPS report..." Very nice.

[noire.livejournal.com]

Service *has* been particularly bad of late. The past few weeks there have been delays *every time* I have taken the T.

Thank you for the phone number. That's useful information (though my place of work has been quite reasonable these past few weeks--everyone has been caught in the delay.)

[strangeanimal.livejournal.com]

very good-to-know information. you rock.