Wow... does anyone remember T tokens?
My commute yesterday was, shall we say, special. On a normal day it takes me about an hour and half to get to work from my house in the 'burbs. Half an hour on the bus, half an hour on the Blue Line and half an hour on the Green Line. Yesterday, it took me two and a half hours just to get to Park Street- that's one stop after where I get on the Green Line.
The bus was good... well as good as the bus can be. When I got on the Blue Line the conductor informed us that they were having signal problems and that we would be going "very slowly and safely" to Boston. Two stops later we're told that our train is being taken out of service and that there was another train right behind us. What 'right behind us' means in MBTA lingo is 'there will be another train coming by sometime in the next 20 minutes." Ten minutes later I'm standing on another Blue Line train. I wasn't so happy about this because I had left a seat on a fairly empty train for standing-room only in a super packed train. Thank goodness I had my book with me.
An hour or so later we finally get to Government Center and I think to myself, "finally, trains that move!" Little did I know that this signal problem wasn't confined to just the Blue Line but was slowing down the entire MBTA. Super. I waited another hour at Government Center but my train never came. The trains that did come were barely moving. A train would arrive, let people on, and then sit there long enough to have to let more people on. At this point I had already texted my awesome boss that I was going to be late. I texted her again to tell her I had no idea when I was going to be getting to work. She then told me to wait for her at Park Street and she would pick me up. She's just awesome like that.
This was the case for most of commuting Boston yesterday morning. I have no idea when I would have gotten to work had I taken the T the entire way there. I still had seven stops to go after Park Street and I still ended up being almost an hour and a half late. Its really interesting to see how much trouble one blown transformer (or whatever it actually was) can cause for an entire city. I can't imagine what this would have been like had it happened in New York City. But at least I read about 100 pages of my book. That's good right?
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