Below is an actual letter I sent to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority today:

Dear Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority,

 

I’m an easygoing person. It takes a lot to upset me. I’ve gotten used to the lack of competence and enthusiasm exhibited almost universally throughout the D.C.-area service industry. I’m fine with it. If I had to do some of the jobs people around here have to do, I admit I’d be pretty grumpy, too!

 

But then again, there’s just something about the WMATA that transcends mere incompetence. You are astonishingly bad at what you do, and I just couldn’t survive another day without telling you that.

 

I remember reading about the Metro system when I first moved to Washington – about how efficient and reliable it is. Call me naïve, but I believed it. Maybe I was just caught up in the excitement of living in a new city. As it turns out, Metro stations and trains are nothing more than boxes of sadness. Metro is a mountain I must climb every day between home and work and vice versa. My day cannot begin or end without first going through Metro, and it makes me profoundly depressed to say that.

 

Since you’re in the business of transportation, I’m sure that you’ve noticed Washington has a major traffic problem. Too many people drive too many cars in too small an area. That’s not your fault. But at the same time, it’s your job to offer a suitable alternative for those of us who don’t drive. That’s where you come up short.

 

Let me delve deeper into my criticisms with a bulleted list of grievances. I will do my best to avoid anecdotes and instead keep my observations general, but you’ll excuse me if I relate a story or two here and there in support of my complaints.

 

·         Random delays: You make me late all too often. Your trains inexplicably stop mid-tunnel or at station platforms for several minutes at a time. Please explain why a “schedule adjustment” (a phrase your train conductors are very fond of) never works out in my favor.

 

·         Bad decisions: When you’re trying to help, you only make problems worse. For example, at Foggy Bottom station – where I pass through every day – you have been repairing two of the three escalators that connect the mezzanine level to the street level during both the morning and evening rush hours, making them completely inaccessible. This is not necessary. Yes, escalators break. Sometimes two at the same time. But you know what an escalator is when it’s broken? Stairs. Please fix just one at a time, and only do it when there aren’t 10,000 people trying to enter or exit the station at the same time.

 

·         Misplaced priorities: You spend a lot of time and money trying to prevent people from eating or drinking on your trains and not enough making Metro more efficient. You boast that your Draconian measures keep Metro free of rats and other vermin. But you know what? There should be rats in subways. It adds to the experience and gives people something to look at. Besides, if you don’t like rats, all you have to do is throw pennies at them and they run away. You could even have someone pick up all the thrown pennies and consider them an extra source of income.

 

·         Unhelpful staff: On multiple occasions I’ve stopped to ask your employees questions about schedules or operating procedures, and I’m always met with one of three responses: a shrug, a blank stare, or a lie. None of those things are helpful.

 

·         Filthiness: Getting back to the whole cleanliness thing, Metro isn’t that clean. It often smells like rotting fish.

 

·         General ugliness: I think my friend Keith said it best: Metro stations look like Soviet-era bomb shelters. Would it hurt to use a color other than prison-grey?

 

I hope by now I’ve made it abundantly clear that there is nothing pleasant about riding Metro. I do it because I have to, not because I want to. I don’t want to hate you, but you make it so easy. Please change your ways or risk losing me forever.

 

Sincerely,

JMH

From my friend Dan, stuck at an airport in Bogotá:

“Señor, to apologize for this inconvenience, we would like to give you a free round-trip ticket anywhere in the world, valid for one year, and a hamburger, valid for the next three hours.”

Below is an actual letter I sent to Target today:

Dear Target,

I am writing to you about the following item: Elite Poster Frame - Black (24×36″) (ASIN: B0018KLAHI, DPCI: 074-15-1772). I would very much like to purchase five (5) of these, but you are making it difficult. I have used the “Find it at a Target store” option on your Web site, which assures me that my local Target stores have the frames in stock. However, when I visit my local Target stores, none of them actually have the aforementioned item in stock. On two occasions, Target employees assured me there would be more in stock the following day, but when I returned, there were none available. I might add, only one of the two Target employees was what I would consider friendly.

In order to rectify this situation, I would like to order the frames online and have the shipping charges waived.

I have long been a loyal Target shopper, and I would hate to have our relationship sullied by a situation that so easily could be fixed.

I appreciate your attention and prompt reply on this matter.

Sincerely,

JMH

This is why Detroit can’t have nice things.

Someone needs to work on his problem-solving skills. Calling the police on yourself then getting arrested over a sandwich = failure.

Google recently launched its new online encyclopedia, Knol, to compete with Wikipedia. Aside from the ugly layout and extremely limited number of entries, Google has another problem on its hands:

Yeah, if you Google “Knol” the Wikipedia entry about Knol comes up before the actual link to Knol. Oops.

At the Metro station where I get off for work every morning, there are three escalators that connect the platform to the street. The center one changes direction once a day to accommodate everyone getting off the trains during the morning rush and everyone getting on the trains during the evening rush. It’s normally very efficient.

All three escalators have been out of order for the past week, which in and of itself is not a problem. After all, “An escalator can never break; it can only become stairs. You would never see an ‘Escalator temporarily out of order’ sign, just ‘Escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience.’ ”* I’m young and mostly healthy, and I don’t mind taking the stairs. For those incapable, there’s an elevator to the street.

So what’s the problem? Nothing, until the geniuses who run the Metro decide to repair two of the malfunctioning escalators in the middle of the Monday morning rush hour. Not just repair, but dismantle and render completely useless. Sure, we could’ve tried to jump over the 6-foot hole in the broken escalator, but why take the chance of falling in and being eaten by the gremlins or whatever it is that makes those things move, ya know?

So all 5,000 of us crammed onto the one escalator that was intact, which made for the dumbest delay in the history of my morning commute. In the end it took 15 minutes to walk the 100 feet from the train to the street - a small inconvenience, but one that could’ve been so easily avoided. Next time, please fix the escalators over the weekend. Or in the middle of the night. Or at 9:45 instead of 8:45. Or just let them be stairs.

UPDATE: There is now a sign on one of the escalators saying that it is closed for repair and will be reopened sometime in September 2008.

* We miss you, Mitch.

John McCain (circa 1892)

It was pretty good.

For a kid growing up in the 1980s, there were few joys greater than going to Showbiz Pizza Place. Skee ball, rides, junky prizes, and junkier pizza combined to make Showbiz a suburban oasis.

But it wasn’t all fun and games. There was also music! A couple times an hour, the Rock-afire Explosion, a group of large animatronic animals would “perform” the hits of the day. They had a gorilla, a bear, a bird, and a couple of animals that were either dogs or mice or god knows what. It was weird, raucous, and terrifying. Few things in life scared me as much as the keyboardist gorilla. Sure, he was just jammin’ away up on stage, but I could tell what he was really thinking about was eating me alive. And the one time I worked up the nerve to peek under the curtain when the band was taking a break, I swear the robo-gorilla came to life and told me he wanted to drink my blood and use my tiny little bones as toothpicks.

So imagine my dismay when I found out that there’s an entire subculture (maybe I’m using that term loosely) of people out there whose primarily goal is to keep the Rock-afire Explosion alive. They collect Rock-afire merchandise and even go so far as to buy up the robotic animals and reprogram them to play a whole new array of songs. Their exploits have been chronicled in a soon-to-be-released documentary. Just to give you an idea of what kind of people we’re dealing with, one enthusiast in the trailer remarks, “It was like being in rock-n-roll. Exactly like being in rock-n-roll.” Yikes.

As for me, this one will be in my nightmares tonight:

More videos here.

(Thanks to IT Master Gordo for the links.)