What A Strange Trip It Was

I had a very strange commute home yesterday...

When I leave work, I have several options for how to get home. Which way I choose to go depends on the time, the weather, and the information I get from the T's web site (now with banner ads, yay!) about how the buses and trains are running. I also use MBTAinfo to check the ETA for certain bus routes.

The CT2 takes me over to Ruggles station on the Orange Line, but it only runs every half-hour or so, so it's not always the best option. Yesterday it was on the way when I was leaving work, so I walked up to the corner of Huntington and Longwood to catch it.

When the bus came, it went a bit past the stop before stopping. One person got off, and one other person and I got on. The bus was totally packed, so we really had to squeeze in. The driver told us that's why she'd gone past the stop; she was implying that if that one person hadn't wanted to get off at that stop, she wouldn't have stopped at all. While I sympathize with the driver's predicament, when a bus is approaching I can't necessarily tell how full it is. (Those of you with better vision may be able to.)

We made it to Ruggles, and I headed inside. At the fare gates the guy ahead of me did something I've never seen anyone do since the T installed the Charlie card system: he put his card in the turnstile to his left, instead of the one to his right. As soon as he'd done it, he realized he'd made a mistake, and slipped through the gate behind the person ahead of him. This threw off my timing, and as I tapped my card and started through, the gates closed on me before opening again, giving me a pretty good whack on my upper arm (those things have sharp edges).

When I got down to the platform it was much more crowded than usual, but there were no announcements about a delay, so I waited a couple of minutes and a train came. I always board at the very front of the train because at Wellington the only exit is at that end of the platform, and in a rush-hour crowd not having to walk that extra distance and navigate through the crowd can mean the difference between making the bus and having to wait 20 minutes for the next one.

When I got on the train, a woman with a baby in a stroller was taking up three seats, using her backpack on the third one. She told me I could not sit there. I asked why. She pointed to the window behind her, which was cracked in several directions. I asked why she was sitting there. She said she was a T employee, she was off-duty but was taking the train somewhere when the window was damaged a few stops before Ruggles and that had delayed the train. (That explained the crowd on the platform.) She was attempting to keep people from using the seats because she believed the window was going to shatter.

I apologized, explaining that since she was not wearing a uniform or anything else that would have obviously identified her as a T employee, I just assumed she was a typical T nutjob. After talking to her for a moment, I realized that I had seen her once before, in uniform on another evening train, talking to another T employee. At the next stop I was able to get a seat nearby, and spent the rest of the ride reading and listening to her warding off other would-be sitters. The window never broke, but the cracks did get larger.

There was also a minor altercation of some sort around Downtown Crossing, where a woman on the platform rather rudely told the person ahead of her to push into the train so she too could fit in. They both managed to squeeze on, and there was some additional back-and-forth verbal sparring, but I wasn't close enough to hear it. Too bad; it probably would have made for a nice "Overheard" bit.

At some point I realized that I would have been better off going home a different way. It's not often that the Green Line seems like the better option, but yesterday was definitely one of those days. Of course, I still would have had to transfer at North Station...