Alewife Station, 8am.
You know what I love about the MBTA? They can turn the most mundane, boring, routine weekday commute into an adventure.
This morning I arrived at Alewife station on the verge of sweating profusely from walking 1.5 miles in the sunless muggy malaise. Same old boring walk to the same old boring stairs to the same old boring turnstiles, when…
“The Red Line is not running!” a feminine voice inflicted with a murderous Boston accent shrieked down into the belly of the station from the ground-level busway. “I repeat, the Red Line is not running!”
Hmm. This woman could be a lunatic, or she could be a MBTA employee. Most likely, she was both.
“Shuttle buses are upstairs!” she shrieked. Upon reflection, it was a bad idea to listen to an MBTA employee who evidently lacked the authority to use the intercom, but I rushed upstairs to the bus way and crammed myself onto the single idling shuttle bus. I considered myself lucky, because hundreds of people pour into Alewife every ten minutes, so I’d say they were going to be needing a few more buses.
I hate buses, I really do. I especially hate standing on a bus, in lurching stop and go traffic, with somebody’s backpack forcing my torso against a stranger’s shoulder, griping a slightly oily pole, while staring out the window at all the single-occupant SUVs driving by.
It took 25 minutes for the bus to reach Davis Square, the next Red Line stop. A crowd several hundred strong was packed on the Davis Square subway platform, and an automated voice apologized for the “delays to a switching problem” (aka ‘we’re having trouble pushing a button.’) After ten minutes, a train finally pulled up…. the train was coming from Alewife…. and wouldn’t you know? There were people on it. So many people that I couldn’t get on the train. Or the next one. I had taken a bus from Alewife to Davis Square so that I could watch trains coming from Alewife leave without me.
I arrived at work 55 minutes later, unvented rage percolating in my stomach like a head of raw poorly-chewed cabbage.
