First off, a big thanks to Straphanger Joe for stepping in to keep the site fresh in my absence.

 

The family vacay was great–sun, beach, and an endless supply of buffet food and cerveza in the Dominican Republic. All we needed was a decent flight home Saturday to close the happy loop.

 

Indeed, New York was downright besieged by nasty weather. Despite the Male Stewardess on Delta assuring me that a little wind in New York wouldn’t slow us down–the CNN on our tiny airplane TV said winds were about 68 mph at JFK–the plane banged a left as soon as we crossed the U.S. coast, and headed for a surprise stop in Atlanta instead of JFK.

 

Atlanta Hartsfield is legendary for its busy-ness; add untold thousands of pissed off New Yorkers, sunburned and perhaps even still sand in the crotch, rerouted from the likes of the DR, Puerto Rico, Orlando, etc., and it was just mayhem–no one knowing where to go or what to do, people cutting lines to nowhere, a jammed airport suddenly swollen like the banks of the Bronx River. The worst of human nature at its best.

 

Two little ones in tow, we saw no hope in crashing in the airport, and quickly booked a room at a nearby Hilton for what certainly seemed like a reasonable rate, at least by New York standards. Thank God for the Blackberry.

 

We checked in around 10:30 p.m. and, after getting Little Miss C and Little G to bed, I huddled over the Blackberry again from our bathroom. Calls to Delta’s main line got the immediate busy signal, but calls to the Sky Miles club (like I’m really a member) actually were met with a human. I got a nice lady named Bobbie who repeatedly attemped to get us on a flight the next day, but as soon as something became available, it was quickly grabbed.

 

“It’s like…moving pictures,” she said, not quite the apt metaphor but I got the picture.

 

She eventually got us on two flights: the Missus and Little Miss C on an 8 a.m., and me and Little G on an 8:15er.

 

It was close to midnight. We’d lost an hour coming from the Dominican, and were about to lose another due to daylight savings. We shut out the night’s misery and slept.

 

And woke up five hours later to get the kids together and get to the airport.

 

It was pitch black and cold behind the Hilton in Atlanta. The queue for the freakin’ airport shuttle was 50 deep, despite a pair of short buses making the run.

 

Our clothes better suited for the Dominican than ATL’s surprising chill, we lost about 10 minutes waiting for an available bus—an amount of time that would bite us on the ass later.

 

The airport was pretty much the same madhouse as the night before; massive lines for everything. We finally checked luggage and the Missus and Little Miss C bolted for their 8 a.m. flight, us boys a bit behind.

 

Security was downright slammed; the girls breezed through, though, as Little Miss C was in a stroller. They made their plane.

 

Me and Little G, however, stuck in security, missed it by five minutes.

 

And so our 12 hour ordeal at Hartsfield began, as we rode the monorail to various stops (A, B, E) and attempted to go standby on various flights (9:50, noon, etc.). The standby boarding passes piled up in my pocket like spent OTB slips.

The system is more crooked than a New York governor. We were #s 17 and 18 for the 9:50 flight, then #63 and 64 for the nooner. If you think you’re prioritized because you’re traveling with a hungry, underslept 4 year old, you’re sorely mistaken.

 

The standby crowd gradually got to know one another as we schlepped from gate to gate like migrant workers. We got to talking with Tom from Ardsley, a 40-something who was traveling with two senior citizen females, perhaps one of them being his mother, and one of them in a wheelchair.

 

In between playing dinosaurs with Little G (Little Foot goes to a scary place called Meat-Eater-Ville and has a close call with a hungry T Rex called Sharptooth, played over and over and over with minor variations), we kept calling the Sky Miles hotline on the Blackberry, and were told the earliest possible flight to New York was Tuesday morning—a full 48 hours away.

 

Little G wondered why we couldn’t just get on that airplane, and the next, and the next, and I had a difficult time explaining the concept of the standby procedure to him.

 

Eventually the Blackberry died, the recharger buried in my luggage somewhere in the bowels of Hartsfield.

 

Just as we’d looked into flights to Baltimore, Phila and Washington, Tom From Ardsley had tried Cincy, Detroit, anywhere that would get him and his ladies out of Atlanta and toward New York.

 

We realized there are two approaches to getting nasty with an airline employee. You can get just simply downright nasty with no real strategy for getting results, as we’d seen the mook dumbass in the Yankee shirt do the night before as he rammed his SmartCart (the only smart part of his operation) past a line of stranded stragglers to show an airline employee he was angry about the disorganization and lack of communication. (In fact I sat across from the aisle from that mook dumbass on the flight to the DR; when the 8:30 a.m. departure hadn’t happened by 8:35, he yelled, “It’s 8:35, c’mon, let’s go-oohhh!!”

 

The other approach is what Tom From Ardsley did—yell and scream but do it in a way that nudges the employee into producing some sort of gainful result.

 

After failing to successfully cajole an employee at the Blackberry store near our gate to let us have a courtesy charge, we bought a new charger–35 bucks, if you’re scoring at home. After a brief charge, we got on the horn again, and scored our first break in 24 hours: a flight the next morning.

 

Suddenly our mood lifted; I began seeing Atlanta in a positive light. Get a hotel room downtown, see the sights with Little G, drink the native Coca Cola, see where Andre 3000 grew up, be up in the air inside of 24 hours. It sounded eminently doable.

 

Meanwhile, Tom From Ardsley was working a Delta employee pretty hard, and got results: a flight to Newark that afternoon. Tom told me he’d told the man that me and Little G needed to get out that day too, and that we should talk to the Delta guy.

 

I weighed my options: the flight the next morning was OK by me, but leaving that day would be unthinkably good. I approached him, hoisting Little G up to eye level so the Delta guy could see the sadness and tiredness in the whelp’s mug.

 

The Delta guy was Michael Hagans, a handsome black man with a gigantic, winning smile. I told him my new pal Tom From Ardsley said he had some magic powers to get people home. Hagans smiled that megasmile and began typing.

 

He typed for several minutes. On cue, Little G whined about how miserable he was.

 

“It’s OK, Little G, I know you’re exhausted,” I said, pinching his bottom to maximize the look of despair on his face. “This man is going to do his best to help us get home.”

 

I may have muttered something about the kid’s emergency medication back in New York, I’m not sure.

 

Hagans asked if we’d go to Newark. Sure, the gals went to JFK, but they’d probably be home long before use anyway. Absolutely, I told him.

 

Typing. More typing. More freakin’ typing. Magic fingers coming up with the winning keyboard combination.

 

“OK,” said Hagans. “You’re all set. Two seats flying to Newark at 5:30 today.”

 

I shook Hagans’ hand, though I would’ve preferred to kiss him. Little G gave him an emphatic high five. I hugged Little G.

 

“Keep taking care of your family,” Hagans told me, words I may not forget for a long time.

 

We were over the moon. We celebrated by riding an escalator to a Heineken-branded restaurant, which was set apart from the rest of the dreaded airport. We got lunch and set about working on Little G’s airplane Lego model we’d bought at the gift shop. Buying it was alternately brilliant and foolish; it would occupy a bored, cranky four year old for hours, but it also required intense concentration to put together, and that was in short supply after the previous 12 hours’ events. Plus, I’m just not that hot at models and other spatial-relations-related exercises.

 

The food came, a chicken cordon bleu sandwich, a grilled cheese, some chips, Sprites. The house music played some country broad – Shania, Trisha, I dunno – covering, fittingly, Motley Crue’s “Home Sweet Home.” “I’m on my way, I’m on my way,” she twanged. “Home…sweeeeet…home.”

 

And, five hours and endless dinosaur role playing later, we were. I must’ve stared at my boarding pass a dozen times, making sure it was real, treating it like the golden ticket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

 

Our seats were in the rear of the plane, but that didn’t stop us from pushing to the front as soon as they started boarding the rich people and using the face of an exhausted four year old to our advantage. They let us on, and we locked into our seats like we’d never give them up—whether or not Delta found the nine people it needed to opt for the $600 voucher and night in Detroit to solve its little overbooking problem.

 

Soon as the wheels went up, Little G fell asleep. I looked down at him, curled up so tiny in his seat, and it just hit me, my mind a jumble of SmartCarts and droning Delta announcements and Monorail rides and Little G scared by the unnecessarily loud auto-flush toilets. I dropped a tear the size of a whiskey shot on my sleeping son.

 

PAST PLANEJOTTINGS INVOLVING DELTA HERE

TJ will be back this week. Thanks for hanging in there with the Straphanger and Jersey Jim while TJ himself was on vacation. Keep the comments coming in and see you on the rails.

A sad day yesterday on New Jersey Transit. As our 5:18 express train from Penn Station reached East Orange, the train stopped abruptly. After a momentary pause, the conductor made an announcement that our train had hit someone in the tracks, and there had been a fatality. He informed us that we would be awaiting local police, and eventually, a replacement train. It seemed to happen very uniformly, there was no confusion about how things would proceed from there.

 

Lots of quiet waiting for the passengers, as phone calls were made, dinner plans changed, and small exchanges of conversations with seatmates and folks across the aisle.

 

A few repeat announcements, and delay of all trains, causing 45 minute delays both east and westbound. We eventually disembarked and walked down from the elevated tracks. Back up to the additional track, and crowded onto an awaiting train.

 

As we left East Orange, the announcement on the new train spoke of delays “for a tresspasser incident.” We all knew it was much, much more than that.

 

- jerseyjim

I heard it yesterday and then again today. It could be I’ve missed it before while in a straphanger fog. But two days in a row means it’s probably real and not an illusion.

Yesterday I was on the F train coming home at about 6:36pm. The train was sparsely populated with lots of empty seats. I looked up from my book when the announcement came on because we were stopped between stations at the time and I thought the announcement would be about a delay on the line. I pay attention to delays.”Ladies and gentlemen,” the conductor’s voice began. “A crowded subway is no excuse for a crime of sexual misconduct.” There was more, but I lost some wondering why he was talking about a crowded subway when the car wasn’t even a quarter full. I looked around to see if I was missing some large grouping of people all pushed together somewhere out of my line-of-sight. The conductor might also have said, “sexual harassment crime” instead of “sexual misconduct,” but that could just be me, hearing things, because I’m taking my agency’s, mandatory all-staff-must-attend, yearly workshop on sexual harassment in the workplace on Friday.  I looked for a pen to write down what I’d heard, but by the time I found one the lines were already fading from my memory. There was something about, “… report the crime to your nearest MTA official.” It could have been farthest MTA official, or nearest police, or farthest transit officer, but I missed it so I don’t know.

Today at 5:38pm, on a half full V train sitting at 23rd street, an announcement came on the loudspeaker that sounded like it was a canned PSA. “There is no excuse for sexual misconduct on the subway. If you believe you have been the victim of a crime please contact… ” I missed the rest while I wrote the first part down. I have to learn how to write faster. This time there was nothing to do with a crowded subway and it was followed by an announcement on the train intercom, right above my head about delays in front of us and all trains going express on the F line.

A cityroom blog at the NY Times from October 2, 2009 has the full quote. It seems the campaign was originally a subway advertisement PSA. It said, “Sexual Harassment is a Crime in the subway, too — A crowded train is no excuse for an improper touch. Don’t stand for it or feel ashamed, or be afraid to speak up. Report it to an M.T.A. employee or police officer.” There’s some cause and effect. A June 2006 incident following a July 2007 poll of 1,800 straphangers stating that a large proportion of women had been harassed or assaulted, culminating in the written PSA in September 2009, a slew of handouts (neither of which I’ve ever seen) and either a verbal PSA or a conductor taking the initiative and doing a live version in March of 2010. A four year odyssey to try and address a problem that’s been around since the beginning of time. The problem, as usual with these kinds of campaigns, is it puts the onus on women to do something about it. Don’t feel ashamed or be afraid to speak up, the PSA says, as if the problem is that women aren’t speaking up rather than men behaving badly. Why not a message to all the people who see it happen and don’t say a word, saying, Speak up - don’t allow sexual harassment on the subway. Or, Don’t let men get away with this abuse. Or better yet, why not address the perpetrators with, Sexual misconduct on this train is a crime and won’t be tolerated. Don’t do it or you’ll end up in jail.

Maybe that will be next years campaign.

There’s a poster in front of me showing two guns, one red the other black with the caption, Which is real and which is a toy? above it.

These public service ads have been out since since December but every time I see them I stop and ask myself, Which is real and which is a toy?I look at them and think, this is too obvious - the black is real and the red is a toy. But then I read the sub-headline which says, It’s not the one you think. So the obvious answer then has to be the red gun because that’s not the one you think, which is the black one. But, if my original thought is that it’s the red gun, because why have the ad in the first place if the answer has to be the red gun, then… it’s not the one you think makes me think the obvious answer has to be the black one is the real gun. But, what if they’re both real? It doesn’t say that can’t be, but then why ask which is real… if you don’t want people to make a choice. No, it has to be one and not the other. So the real one has to be… the red one. Unless… it’s the black one in which case it can’t be the red one.Where is my train?

At this point, waiting for the F to arrive I’ve already spent way to much time thinking about guns, something I’d rather not do since I don’t believe anyone should have one, unless they’re a superhero who has only good in his or her heart. Though why a superhero would need a gun because they’re, well, a superhero, I don’t know… unless they’re The Punisher, or Batman. They use guns of various sorts, I think. Or… Hell Boy. Yes, he uses a big gun - a very big gun.

I checked on the ad in a piece from the Daily News and they report that indeed, the red gun is the real gun and the black gun is the toy. It seems City laws require toy guns to be painted red, yellow, or blue (bright colors indeed), only, surprise surprise, gun dealers have caught on and painted real guns the same colors. I’m not sure what all this means other than guns, toy or real, mean trouble. How do British Police officers do their jobs without guns?

Can you image a British ad with a picture of a nightstick - what the English call a truncheon - one red and one black with the caption, Which is real and which is a toy? It’s not the one you think.

It’s been a while since I’ve really looked at the other passengers on the subway. Maybe that’s what winter does to you - it numbs you. Or maybe I’ve just been tired of people and there are too many around you on the train. You’d think I’d be used to it by now.

Well, my vision lifted this morning, probably because it’s supposed to reach 58 today and my bones are aching for some sun.

I took the E-train, a new blue car. It seems like all the cars are now blue-benched. The changeover happened while I was hibernating. All my favorite orange benches are gone.

I almost didn’t get on the train. It was packed. I tried two different doors before I stopped just outside the last one and, looking in at a space that could fit maybe two more people, debated on whether to go in or wait for the next train. I stepped forward as the doors closed, pushing me further in than I wanted to go because my backpack was still on and I hadn’t had a chance to take it off. (That’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it.) A young woman to my left had her back to me. She was reading a book and taking up an additional foot of space with the hardcover. There aught to be a law against that. I reached over someones head and grabbed the center pole. My book was in my hand but I couldn’t get to it. There just wasn’t any room. I made eye contact with three people and looked away after each one, smiling half-heartedly. A large woman in a bright red wool coat came in behind me and we all accommodated her space as she took central pole position right underneath my arm.

I looked across the car towards the other door and saw a young woman in business attire with wispy hair ruffled as if it had been pushed about by the wind. She was reading the Dailey News and making little sounds as she read, pinching her cheeks in then puffing them out, then biting her teeth together - a veritable orchestra of tiny sounds and small dramatic movements. I couldn’t tell what she was reading so I shifted a bit around the large woman in the red coat in order to get a better look. It was either movie reviews or the obits.  Without large headlines to see or my glasses, I couldn’t tell. My glasses were in my bag and my bag was inaccessible. I watched her face as the orchestra of twitches, grimaces and frowns continued.

Stops came and went. The orchestra played on. Finally in an especially crowded moment I lost sight of her. The woman in the red coat looked up at me - I was a little too close to her so I moved back. My backpack poked into someone behind me. “Sorry,” I said over my shoulder. I looked back but tall heads and reaching arms obscured my view.

At the next stop, 42nd street, most of the car left in a giant exodus of folding papers, closing books, and iPhone and cell button pushing fingers. I saw the back of the woman’s head and her wispy brown hair, then a flash of the paper under her arm, and… she was gone.

I looked around me and found myself free of most of humanity -the car practically empty. The woman in the red coat was gone. I had the pole to myself. I opened my book on Iyengar Yoga and read. Although there were now seats empty, I stood the next two stops and got off on 23rd. It was still cold outside and windy. I’d worn a spring jacket, like an idiot. Maybe it’ll be 58 later in the day, but right then it was still pretty damned cold.

This bit of Westchester commuter humor before I sign off for the week comes from Jimmy Fallon.

A woman who lives a mile from the Clintons in Chappaqua, New York has been charged with prostitution.

The woman said she hates living in Chappaqua but she loves the one-mile commute.

[image: skaneatelesdesign.com]

TJ is on vacay starting in, oh, 3 hours and 15 minutes, and probably unable and unwilling to post.

In my stead is the capable and charming Straphanger Joe, who will be maintaining Trainjotting next week, and adding his observations from the subways.

Joe is an old friend, an astute observer and a talented writer. He’s contributed his “Straphanger Joe” musings to this site--dozens of entertaining essays, in fact–for most of the 3-plus years Trainjotting has been in existence.

We’re psyched to see what he comes up with next week.

Upon our return, every iota of last week’s snow will be gone, and sunset will be late enough so that we will be able to see a hint of the bright yellow ball and all its radiance poking over the mid-Westchester hills to the west as we return home after work.

If neither of these wishes are met, we’ll have to embark on another vacation until they are.

The woman who “flashed” her MetroCard at the 28th Street station this morning.

We were getting off the downtown-bound 6, and were making our way to the emergency exit door that leads to the way out at 26th Street.

You were flying into the station, desperate to get on board that train. You were blonde and about 40, with an expression that brought to mind grave seriousness, though we can’t say for sure if the unique circumstances in which we encountered you contributed to such a mask. Perhaps you sport a different face on weekends, peering over the Sunday Times in slippers made to look like rabbits.

But today, it was Game Face.

As is often the case, there’s really no way to effectively swim upstream when you’re trying to get past a teeming mass of humanity flooding the turnstiles in the opposite direction. Let’s face it, you’re on the next train, important meeting or not.

So what did you do? I mean, you had to be on that train. At 9:10, the next one might not arrive for, oh, another four minutes or so.

This is what you did. Seeing a slight break in traffic flooding past the iron emergency exit door, you made your break. Of course, there was the small matter of actually paying for your fare–not an option when you go through the emergency door, unless there’s a token clerk there to ring you up, and there hasn’t been a clerk in that spot since Ford told the city to drop dead.

Nonetheless, you, Woman With Grave Expression, At Least This Morning, flashed your MetroCard through the air, like Detective Sipowicz showing his “shield” at a crime scene (”Uh, sorry for your loss, ma’am. Whadda we got, boys?”), as if some invisible magnetic laser would extend from the turnstile to your card and charge you the required $2.25.

It was as if you were saying, I’m willing to pay, I even have my card out! I just don’t have time to pay the fare. No, not me. Places to go, people to see. Hard work to do before the rabbit slippers this weekend.

I wasn’t able to tell if you got on that train, Ma’am. I can only hope a member of law enforcement mimicked your motion and flashed you something with more juice than a MetroCard.

Slate.com has a a fun story penned by Julia Turner on yet another reason to dislike Penn Station–impossible-to-follow signs.

Penn Station’s signage got 2.5 stars on Yelp.com (”Without a doubt, one of the poorest and most confusing arrangements for signage and passenger movement that I can imagine”), Turner notes, compared to the 4.5 stars Grand Central got.

Of course, comparing Penn Station to Grand Central is comparing Tad’s Steakhouse to Gramercy Tavern Camryn Manheim to Cameron Diaz.

But Turner does some digging into signmaking and “wayfinding”–the school of thought about how best to get people from Point A to Points B, C and D–and discovers what sort of a conflicting mess the Penn Station signs representing Amtrak, LIRR and NJT make in aggregate.

She writes:

The problem at Penn Station is not that designers skipped these steps. It’s that three sets of designers did them three times. Penn Station is owned by Amtrak, which manages its concourse on the western side of the station. But Amtrak leases the rest of the station out to the two other tenants: New Jersey Transit has the southeast corner, and the LIRR the northeast. (The Metropolitan Transit Authority oversees both the LIRR and New York City Transit, which manages the two adjacent subway stations; their sign systems are similar to the LIRR’s.) The fundamental wayfinding problem at Penn Station lies in the fact that each of these entities manages its own signs, usually without consulting the others. As a result, the station essentially has three different systems of signage.

This is a crazy way to manage information at the biggest railway station in the country. The user experiences Penn Station as one place. But the current system assumes that the user experiences the station as three distinct spaces. In truth, though, as we saw in the slide show above, many journeys require travelers to cross from zone to zone.

It’s a fun read. It’s here.