It was a normal Monday morning by any standards here in Boston. I rushed through the rain down to the train station only to wait for about 10 minutes for the train (T schedules claim rush hour trains arrive every 4 minutes). Once the train "took off" it proceeded to stop in the middle of the tunnel (not at a station) every 50 feet or so and wait for some indescribably long time. You see, when you're rapidly becoming late for work and the train isn't going anywhere, time slows to just about absolute zero (you know, that temperature where all atomic motion ceases). I know I know, temperature isn't used to measure time, but you get the idea. So after an insanely long train ride, I got stuck on the stairs behind some family of overweight tourists and realized it was high time for me to compile a hate-list. If you've ridden on public transit before, I guarantee you'll end up recognizing a few of these. In fact, I'm sure you'll recognize some of these from my own previous rants.
- Insanely Loud High School Students: These kids have never heard the term "quiet" in their lives, I imagine. Thankfully, I've never been on the same car with these ones during the morning commute, but it's probably just as bad in the evening when you're coming home from work with a headache so bad it feels like your brain is gelatinous. Typically, any one conversation that is louder than the screeching of metal on metal that the T trains tend to produce can be drowned out with a simple pair of headphones. Not the case with these little harbingers of doom. I didn't think it was possible for there to be a more annoying sound on the T than the screeching wheels. But "Oh nuh-uh she didn't!" screamed at the top of one's recently-pubescent lungs takes the cake. These kids are universally reviled. Everyone in the train stares at them, silently boring black holes of death into their loud-assed skulls. The Upside: almost to a (wo)man, the kids get off at Central Square, leaving the survivors with a peaceful ride for the next few stops. There is no upside if they don't get off the train.
- The Mystery Fart-Machine: I know I have bitched about this one before, but I really can't stress to you how annoying (and nauseating) it is to smell someone's "shit particles" in an enclosed space. The T should smell like burning plastic (typical), wet dog (rainy day), or nothing. Period. Unfortunately, there are those, like "Mr. Anderson" in The Matrix, who seem to think that certain rules don't apply to them. I just wish there was something they could pump into the air that made it obvious who "sealed the deal." You know, like the "water turning purple" that people warn their kids about in the pool. Whenever some jerk cuts one in the T, you get a big orange cloud erupting from their ass. Okay so the visual isn't very appealing but then you know who did it and you can administer disgusted facial expressions as appropriate.
- Smokers: It's fine if you want to blacken your lungs on your own time and out in the open. I really don't care. However, I do begin to care when I don't have a choice about what I'm breathing (which is why T farts piss me off too). There are certain clever individuals who think they're doing something "badass" and "rebellious" by smoking while waiting for the train. I don't think I've ever seen someone stupid enough to smoke on the train. Oh no wait, yes I have, see thugs below. In any case, these T-smokers haven't yet figured out that smoking no longer makes you look like a cool rebel. You just look like every other schmoe who has a white stick permanently glued between their fingers. Oh, but you're doing it in the station and pissing off everyone around you, that makes you look so unbelievably cool! Perhaps you'll look cooler when someone throws your rebellious ass into the track pit. Go ahead, touch that third rail. The sign says "DANGER - 10 QUINTILLION VOLTS OF INNER-ORGAN-JELLIFYING ELECTRICITY" so that means you've gotta break that rule too!
- Pre-Pubescent Thugs: I've only experienced this once, actually, but that one time was plenty enough for me. Saturday evening T rides, by the way, are typically the most vile rides you will ever take. I mistakenly stepped on the train with my friend into an entire group of pre- and barely-pubescent thugs. They kind of overlap with the Loud High School Student category, but they're far more threatening. As if the cigar smoking wasn't bad enough, there was the 12 year old kid staring at my friend's partially-exposed (it was club-night, after all) boobs and fondling himself. Yes, fondling himself. In her face. I would have killed him, but frankly I didn't really feel like getting my ass kicked by a hoard of 15-year-olds.
- Drunk Funky Guy: For some reason, every time I see this guy he's drunkenly trying to flirt or somehow make weird conversation with some overly-nice asian girl. I don't know what kind of cosmic forces are at work so that it happens like this every time, but I swear it's true. I've mentioned it before, and I will mention it again: there are so many people on the train who pity her and want to help her, but no way in hell does anyone want to upset the natural balance of things and remove her as the buffer. He might make everyone on the T uncomfortable, but at least he's talking to her and not you right? Inevitably, he smells too, and you know what I feel about people who stink on the T. I wish they could install some sort of stink-detectors at the turnstiles. Keep the riffraff out!
- Drunk Guys from Southie: Someone will probably rail me for being classist or something, but there really isn't any sort of class distinction here. All right well I'm making an assumption that they're from Southie, but where the hell else would they be from? These guys are really freaking annoying. They've got the social grace of hyenas, and roughly the same pack mentality. They're going from one bar to another on a Saturday night and they're already loaded. Witness an example: Man with an older-styled hat steps on the train. Drunk Guy from Southie #1 says to other 3 Drunk Guys from Southie "Hey, look everyone, it's Tommy-Lee Jones!" Note, however, that I have never seen Tommy-Lee Jones wear a hat like that. Also note, the guy looked nothing like Tommy-Lee Jones. It helps to be a little educated about your speaking topic, dolt. Then again, what the hell do I know? I'm not a Drunk Guy from Southie.
- Mr./Mrs. Impatient: An everyday commuter just like the rest of us, but this person has to be wherever about 5 minutes ago. Naturally, the train still has 2 or 3 minutes to go before it reaches the station, but Captain Impatient shoves through the train, putting everyone off balance, just so (s)he can be off the train absolutely first. I always get a kick out of seeing this, because inevitably this person will fly off the train like The freaking Flash and end up, every time, behind some dumbass who won't walk up the escalator. Sucker!
- Fugly Couple Making Out: I don't have much to say about this at all. Just don't freakin' do it, all right? It's bad enough that we have to see your ugly pusses occupying the same 5 square foot space. It's an entirely different matter when you decide to share your undying love with the rest of us. Gah! Put some damn clothes on!
- Fat Kid with Crutches: You may think I'm being overly harsh here, but this one truly takes the cake and is actually the inspiration for this list of oozing public transit angst. The fat kid with crutches. What can I say about him? He's about 10, he weighs as much as I do, and he has crutches. He ascends stairs at a rate of one per minute. There are 14,000 stairs you have to climb to get from the Red Line level to the Green Line level. And an elevator. Did you read that right? Yes. ELEVATOR. I give this evolutionary outcast a little slack on the elevator thing only because of his one-brain-cell family (who also, coincidentally, are fat ... and have crutches ... just kidding). You see, it is so painfully obvious that these invertebrates are tourists that you can't really blame them for not seeing the enormous ELEVATOR signs. But back to the point: fat with crutches. You may be a little cute chunk of lard, but that doesn't exempt you from having motor skills. I've seen people ascend stairs faster with crutches than without. Monday morning rush hour is just not a good time to practice your stair-climbing abilities with your sticks of handicappedness. After I milled around on the platform for a good 5 or 10 hours waiting for this kid to climb the stairway to heaven (read: Green Line), I rushed up the stairs with everyone else ... only to end up stuck behind the kid's fatass family, who is aimlessly milling about at the top of the stairs. So it's really not the kid's fault that he's dumber than a rock, uncoordinated, and 40 pounds too heavy. Blame genetics.
Now that there was a rant. You know there are still others I could include in the list, like the girl on the cell phone or the recruiting mormons. Suffice to say, the T is a dangerous, scary, smelly, annoying place. But all in all (oddly) it's better than driving!
Contrary to what you may be thinking, this is not going to be a film review of a movie that one of my friends often refers to as "the best porn ever." No, I'll let other people review such scintillating monologues as "The Postman always comes twice!" and "My wife's doing the mailman...I like it again!" Regardless, the topic of today's rant revolves around the most bureaucratic institution of the federal government: the US Postal Service.
The postman may very well come twice. I think they even do in Somerville. But 42 Curtis Street (my humble home) seems to be a black hole of Postal Intelligence. The moment the girl (I have seen her - She is, as far as I can verify, female) walks up to our door, all rational thought is rendered null and void. Speaking of void, that may as well be what lies between her ears. If this girl is the template for the average USPS mail carrier, she has proven that it takes no more than the IQ of a cactus to carry mail. You'd think it wouldn't take much, because all you have to do is sort a little. "Sort" is a word that obviously this girl has never heard of. There are three apartments in the house. Three. All last year, she put every bit of mail for every apartment in our mailbox, thus delegating the sorting task to us. This may seem like a rather intelligent task, but you needn't doubt. She is a moron. Every single mailbox at 42 Curtis has names on it. Most of the mail we receive does not match any of the names on any of the mailboxes. It has been this way for the year and a half I have lived there. Periodically, our lovely carrier will leave notes saying "Does She Still Live Here?" Every time I reply back "The only people who live here are the ones on the boxes" just to make sure she gets it into her pea-sized brain that the ONLY PEOPLE WHO LIVE HERE ARE THE ONES ON THE BOXES!!!! It doesn't seem that hard to grasp, does it?
For aforementioned people not living in our house yet still receiving mail there, we used to be able to write "Forward" on the letters and they would promptly be whisked away into some wonderland of mail sorting and eventually routed to the correct recipient. It seems, with this girl, you have to go to extreme lengths to get her to even notice the enormous "FORWARD" written on each envelope. Many of them have gone weeks without her picking them up. I've resorted to propping them up in odd ways so she is guaranteed to see them when she chucks our (and everyone else's) mail into the box. She still manages to miss them. Someday, I swear, in the not-too-distant future, I'm going to snap and simply ask her to stop sucking so much at a job that even geologic formations can do better than her. Of course then, we won't receive any mail at all.
She is only part of the picture. The one institution in the world that is more bureaucractic than the (former) Soviet socialist government is the USPS. Three weeks ago, my landlord sent to me a large sum of money via certified mail (no, not blood money, rather deposit money). Last week the notice came (amazingly) to our mailbox informing me that I could go to the Post Office to pick it up or sign the back, put the note back out, and have the mail delivered. I was foolish enough to believe that our lovely neanderthal carrier could actually get this task right. So I signed the back, posted the little form, and assumed she would bring the letter back. Two days passed in which she didn't even take the form. Then the form disappeared. I figured "Finally, justice is mine!" A week passed without the letter being delivered. So today I have to take some time from work to go to the post office to get this little letter. But I decided that it would be good to call ahead and see if they could even find this letter. Good news: they can't! I have been ferried (via phone, of course) back and forth between the West Somerville office and the Union Square office, each telling me they can't find it and to go back to the other one. What I wonder is, what the hell is the point of certified mail if no one can find it anyway? The landlord might as well have sent a carrier pigeon, as obviously they have better organizational, navigational, and motor skills than our current mail carrier.
I don't quite understand why postal workers are so disgruntled. Sure it's a shitty job, but it's only shitty because the entire system is so dreadfully inefficient. Do you want to know why it's so inefficient? Even if you don't want to know, obviously I'm going to tell you. It's because the USPS keeps hiring complete GOOMBAHS into its workforce. It's such an obvious example of the lowest common denominator, people. The hive is only as good as the lamest bee. Well that was a crappy analogy, but truly I think the USPS is kind of like an insect hive. Lots of officious, useless, buzzing insects trapped in a gooey, apparently organized mess. The point is, the USPS is only as good as its least intelligent member. Judging from the girl writing "Does he live here?" about someone whose name is clearly written on the mailbox, I can't even imagine what the lowest common denominator of the Postal Service really is. Next time, I'm calling Kevin Costner.
I once saw an episode of Dexter's Laboratory in which he grew a synthetic beard to appear more "rugged." With his new rugged appendage, Dexter joined "Action Hank" in a beard duel with some evil flour smugglers. If you're missing the point thus far into my monolgue, fear not - I'm getting there. You see, the creators of the episode may have captured the "ruggedity" of beards, but they managed to completely sidestep the other, darker aspect of facial hair.
The problem with facial hair, at least the week-old variety, is the itch. It is an itch unlike anything I can describe to you. It's not a deep soul-sucking itch like poison ivy or bee stings, nor is it one of those little itches that will go away with a few passes of your fingers. If you don't move, you feel almost OK. But the moment you move your head just a little bit, thousands of prickly little hairs scratch at your tender baby-bum skin. And you itch. Oh how you itch. I have no idea why anyone would actually want to grow a beard, as the process of doing such is sheer torture. You know that all you have to do is go home and shave it off, and the beard-free feeling is like Heaven on Earth. But beards have a purpose, and thus they usually don't get shaven.
This current week-long beard expedition of mine started out as sheer laziness. My facial hair is often a product of above-mentioned motivational deficit. The "benefit" of it is such that I look like an Urban Lumberjack and feel like one of those morose looking kids in Gap commercials. Except as far as I know, I don't dress as stupidly as they do and I don't stand around white rooms looking angry that I'm being paid to look angry.
Apart from laziness, this beard of mine has gained a purpose, and thus cannot be shaven, much as I want to rid myself of the infernal itch. You see, the last time I shaved, the Boston Red Sox lost the second game of their playoff series with the Oakland Athletics. At the time, I gave it no thought, but no sooner had I stopped shaving (read: got lazy) then the Sox began to win. They have won three consecutive nail-biter games since I stopped. Like every good Red Sox fan, I have taken this to heart, knowing deep within my soul that the winning fortunes of my favorite team are inextricably linked with the hair follicles on my rugged face. The Sox play the Yankees tonight, a most hated foe. So you see, it's nearly impossible for me to shave this here Yak's coat the adorns my face. How could I? My own friends would burn me at the stake were I to shave and the Red Sox to lose.
Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy not wasting time shaving. Aside from the fact that I look like some sort of balding Gorilla, the "rugged urban" look isn't so bad either. Aside from the looks I get on the train saying such wonderful things as "man that guy is a lazy non-shaving mofo" or "what a grub," I feel pretty liberated. But don't get me wrong. The itch is driving me insane. My personal sacrifice for the Red Sox brings tears to your eyes, doesn't it? At least, I suppose, it's not like wearing a pear of "lucky Red Sox underwear" since they started winning. That invites, I imagine, a much more infernal itch.