T

I am convinced more than ever that the T is intended to be ridden only be people who already know exactly where they’re going.

I wanted to go to the Arsenal Mall Home Depot to look at weatherproof mailboxes (my mail gets wet when there’s any precipitation). I was hoping there’d be a bus from Harvard Station, since I had been at church, but no luck there; the bus map did show that route 70 goes from Central to Watertown Square, passing the mall. Since a Red Line was just pulling in, I hopped the train to Central.

There was no signage in Central Station, except two “Buses ->” signs pointing in opposite directions that I assume were there to indicate that I had to exit to get to the buses. I made one circle of the block looking for the 70 boarding location, but I could only find route 1, which runs on Mass Ave, and a few of the other buses that pass through Central Square.

The T employee on the inbound side could only give me landmark-based directions, and she used a pizza place that has been out of business for some time. This would only help me if I had been to Central Square several times over the past few years, in which case I would presumably already know where route 70 boards.

The T employee on the outbound side was able to lookup the cross street where route 70 boards, but didn’t know where that was relative to Magazine St and Mass Ave (where the subway station is). He did not have a map of the locations of any of the Central Square bus stops, or even of the square area itself.

Eventually I found the bus stop by following a route 70 bus as it made its turn-around move through the square down Mass Ave. Unfortunately I was too far behind it to get on it, so I had to wait 20 minutes.

One thing that amused me while I was waiting at the bus stop: three male teenagers, none of whom (apparently) knew each other, all wearing the same pair of jeans (although with differently colored accents). They were rather ridiculous looking, way worse than the JNCO jeans I got just to have a cargo pocket. They had velcro binding straps at both the knee and the cuff, purpose unknown but presumably just for looks as none of them had the straps cinched. They also had huge cargo pockets at both the front and back of the knee. The binding straps are apparently available in red, white, and blue. If I were a cool kid, I’d probably know why what they were wearing was cool.

Black Cadillacs” from Good News For People Who Love Bad News by Modest Mouse


Comments

4 responses to “T”

  1. it probably won’t help, but you should send your complaint to the T. sometimes they listen to people and fix easy stuff like having staff kinow basic information like that.

  2. YOU!!! HAVE!!! LLAMA!!!!

  3. AHHHHHHH!!!! Llama face!!!

  4. attack of the old comments!

    It’s not my llama. it lives in Maine.

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