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

[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.