This past week I became an expert herdee. Never heard of a herdee?
From Tuesday morning, I was one of thousands of riders on the green line to Riverside that was shuttled from the train to a bus and back on the train every morning and night for four days on my commute to work. It turns out that the 48 hours of steady rain caused the dirt under the tracks to disappear, creating a sink hole. The pictures just showed a set of tracks with nothing under them. Scary to think that a train could've been passing and derailed.
The first time I did the 1-2-1 routine it was kind of fun; I got to see new areas that were unfamiliar to me because I'm never in a car or bus in those neighborhoods.
It was only three train stops that were closed off but it got tedious very quickly. Unload from the train quickly, follow the mob scene up the stairs to the awaiting buses driven by folks that had just signed up that morning to collect the overtime (familiarity with the route not required), go around collecting other "stranded souls", make your way down the ramp at the station where the track had not been affected and make the trek to one of the last three stations on the line.
By day three, I was ready to scream. Or walk to the Applebee's near one of the stops and have a drink or two. Thank God it wasn't opened at 8:30 in the morning!
At each of the 1-2-1 points there were at least five MBTA employees "guiding" us through the process. Yeah, right!
Guide is probably the verb used early Tuesday morning when the MBTA officials disseminated the plan to the hordes of employees raking in the OT. In reality what these folks did was watch as the one or two shepherds herded the ewes and sheep to the next step in the process.
No comments:
Post a Comment