Lauren of Astoria

My friend Lauren wrote an open letter to the MTA that I wish I had written.  Or at least signed.  But alas, I'm not nearly the writer she is.  Plus, we're all in this together, right?  This sweaty, smelly, humid subway car of life...

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Dear MTA,

I am writing to tell you that you are in critical need of an ass kicking.

It has consistently been taking me about 30 minutes longer to get anywhere than it should. This is likely attributed to your colossal service cuts that eliminated scores of trains and the employees who operate them. This coincided with yet another rate hike. You charge me more, MTA, and you deliver me less.

You must not have been paying attention in Basic Business 101. You were flirting with the class burnout, weren’t you, MTA? Twirling your hair when you should’ve taken notes? You skipped school and raced out to the bleachers, just to find him with his hand up someone else’s shirt. It’s ok, MTA. It’s happened to us all.

But let me explain how it’s supposed to work. You promise to provide BETTER service and customers are incentivized to agree to a price increase. You get more money and give more service. Are we clear?

In the interest of better service, I’d like to make some suggestions.

 

I recommend that rather than scaling back on the people who drive the trains, perhaps you could curtail the people who ride them. For example, consider having a “bouncer” at each station, prohibiting the following groups from entering:

• Old businessmen who tell me to smile
• People over 6 feet tall
• Tourists
• Mariachi bands
• Children
• Passengers wearing any of the following:
• Bedazzled shirts 
• Backpacks
• Cubic zirconia earrings 
• Sunglasses 
• SARS masks 
• Clothes from the previous day 

This should prove to be a much more pleasant experience for Me, and surely some others. In fact, don’t limit yourself! You needn’t stop at people. There’s so much more to get rid of! A few candidates could be stairs, boomboxes blasting Sugarhill Gang, and instances in which I witness another human defecating inside a train car.

 

I hope you’ve found this useful, MTA. I’d tell you in person but it’d take me too long to get to your headquarters, 10 blocks away.

 

Sincerely,

The WB

 

 

 

Rule #4: Suck it up

One thing I love about children is the universal reactions to things.  Almost 100% of the time, you can watch their eyes light up if there's a kitten nearby.  You can also see the complete shutdown when they're tired.  Kids are great, aren't they?  Totally predictable in many ways, but will always surprise you.  (I'm not going to link that line to http://www.mta.info/ because that's not the topic of this post.  Feel free to do so on your own.) 

So, if a kid on the school bus passes gas, what do you think you're going to see?  Most kids will laugh and scream and wrinkle their noses, and a few will put their hands over their mouth/nose.  But there will always, always be one or two that pull the front of their shirt up to cover their nose like a burqa, as if Mom had last washed it with some anti-stink detergent that also happend to smell like grape bubblegum.

Oftentimes, as well, you'll see children put their fingers in their ears due to a loud noise, like a car horn or loud music.  These are universal, and a totally acceptable reactions to the aforementioned scenerios...

...if you're 6.

Once you're older, and have been to a couple of concerts, fireworks displays and professional sporting events, you begin to outgrow that behaviour.  Instead of putting your fingers in your ears to keep away a loud noise, you turn your iPod UP.  Rather than pull your shirt over your face, you wait out the smell, or, in very bad cases, remove yourself from the location entirely.

New York City is full of interesting, and sometimes overwhelming scents and sounds.  But part of being a New Yorker is that we have to deal with some discomfort in order to continue surviving in this town.  So you make do, and you add little things here and there to make the discomfort more bearable.  In extreme cases, one will even find onesself outrunning discomfort by trying to control the behaviours of others - even going as far as writing a blog that outlines the rules of commuting or some such nonsense.

But this post isn't for the kids who smell something bad and pull the front of their shirt up, and it's not for the kids who put fingers in their ears when real life get's too loud.  It's for the adults that do.

For every blog post, every gripe, every "rule" I make up about my fellow New Yorkers not doing what I would, in an ideal world, like them to do, there are about five or ten examples I don't mention.  This is because it's simply a part of living in New York - you put up with things.  You suck it up.  The trade-off for living in such a crowded, noisy, dirty, inarticulate, insensitive, sprawling, pushy, intense, perverse and depraved city is that you can take advantage of the fact that it's expensive, too.

But I suck it up.  I keep walking, one foot in front of the other, one day at a time.  Sometimes a rat will cross my path.  Shiver, but cope.  Keep on walking.  Sometimes there will be a roach in the restaurant.  Notify your server, maybe never eat there again, keep on living. 

We bear the discomfort with armor that only  New Yorker has, knowing that, by doing so, we can safely say, "We're New Yorkers" when we're next in the midwest buying cigarettes for $3 a pack.

But the adults who cover their ears when the subway pulls in?  The ones who cover their noses with the front of their shirts when Mystery Smell invades the train?  They are not New Yorkers.  Regardless of their actual residence, they are tourists, and the presence of such weakness is far worse than a Chinese dinner being consumed on a subway car or a siren passing by.