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

[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.