I have been riding the Toronto transit system regularly since I was 10 years old. For awhile there, until I started walking to work, I knew most of the streetcar drivers on my route well enough to chat with them every morning if the car was empty. Today I experienced something I have never experienced before -- a nasty, really nasty, needs-anger-management-quickly kind of nasty, streetcar driver.
It's mid-afternoon on a Friday, not too busy yet, and the streetcar is filled with people from the financial district who all seem happy to have been sprung from work early. Traffic is sparse. People are chatting. The streetcar is only half-full.
The streetcar stops at a point where two busy downtown streets merge, however, and doesn't move for 1o minutes, despite there having been many opportunities for the driver to move ahead. When a businessman walks to the front of the car and asks the driver if there's a problem, and why aren't we moving, the driver got all macho. A very big guy, he gets out of the driver's seat and menacingly sort of chases the businessman back to his seat, saying over and over again: "Are you telling me how to do my job?? Are you telling me how to do my job???" Soon the streetcar erupts with people telling him to please get back in his seat and drive the streetcar, and this just enrages him further, and he starts yelling at all of us not to tell him how to do his job, why don't you call my supervisor if you don't like it, who the hell do you people think you are -- it got quite menacing. People were starting to ask to get off the streetcar so they could hail cabs the rest of the way home.
The driver then returned to his seat and sat there petulantly, refusing to drive the streetcar, for about 20 minutes. There were about six or seven streetcars piled up behind him, unable to move, and the drivers of those streetcars came to the driver's window and asked him what was going on. Nothing was going on. The guy had an on-the-job temper tantrum, held up traffic and peoples' lives for about 30 minutes due to his own macho insecurities, and should be fired. I'd have been fired from my job -- or made to go into serious anger management -- if I'd ever had a half-hour on-the-job tantrum and refused to provide paying customers with the service they paid for. I issued a complaint and I bet I never hear a word from anyone at the TTC ever again.
4 comments:
Jacy, when you tell stories like this, it makes me wonder about my decision toleave the logging camp and come to Bay Street.
I once had a run-in with a Montreal Transit busdriver who told me falsely that my transfer was not valid and made me pay. I was sick, had nothing but $50 bills, and burst into tears. A fellow traveller paid my fare.
When I got home I phoned the Transit Commission and made a complaint. They never contacted me again, and it still raises my blood pressure to think about it.
I must now direct you to
http://livejournal.com/bad_service/
As a fellow Torontonian and streetcar rider, I feel your pain. It is not for nothing that the abbreviation TTC can also mean "Take The Car".
If one was of a mind to construct the least efficient, most unresponsive government agency imaginable and staff it with the surliest employees with only the barest understanding of the meaning of public service, that person would have to truly work hard to develop something worse than the Toronto Transit Commission.
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