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Prisoner of the Red Line
Oct. 11th, 2007 11:16 am"Attention passengers. This is a test of the public address system. This is only a test."
That message was being looped over the speakers at Park Street with a one minute pause in between, calling us for attention in exactly the same way as it says when a train is about to arrive, but then telling us to pay no attention to the message. Additionally, I've heard that the MBTA are experimenting with piping appalling music into the underground stations in an effort to break the will of their imprisoned passengers and prevent further uprisings. If this is just the beginning, I predict that we'll be seeing several Michael Douglas-type rampages taking place in Boston soon. Most of them by me.
In addition to that, one elderly gentleman sitting next to me noticed my exasperation at the continual non-messages and started reminiscing about the time they'd found a bomb in Alewife station and delayed everything for two hours. Once I replied to that, the same thing that happens when I talk to anyone in this country happened, and soon he was off about his distant relatives in Scotland. The train was arriving at this point, and it seemed rude to wander away to another carriage, so in what was perhaps karma coming back from last week, I found myself stuck with the Boston One-Man Boring People To Death team.
There really was no escape as he bounced from Scotland to immigration to the Iraq War to American history to road-building techniques and back, and his way of shouting over the noise of the train meant that most other passengers in the carriage were watching us as I nodded and "mm'hmm"ed my way through the tidal wave of gibberish that lasted all the way to Davis Square.
Defending against the onslaught wasn't my immediate concern, though. That was the fact that I still had several pages of ZZ Studios up on my computer and had rather been relying on the time on the Red Line to sanitize my Internet history before work. Always plan ahead for this kind of thing.
That message was being looped over the speakers at Park Street with a one minute pause in between, calling us for attention in exactly the same way as it says when a train is about to arrive, but then telling us to pay no attention to the message. Additionally, I've heard that the MBTA are experimenting with piping appalling music into the underground stations in an effort to break the will of their imprisoned passengers and prevent further uprisings. If this is just the beginning, I predict that we'll be seeing several Michael Douglas-type rampages taking place in Boston soon. Most of them by me.
In addition to that, one elderly gentleman sitting next to me noticed my exasperation at the continual non-messages and started reminiscing about the time they'd found a bomb in Alewife station and delayed everything for two hours. Once I replied to that, the same thing that happens when I talk to anyone in this country happened, and soon he was off about his distant relatives in Scotland. The train was arriving at this point, and it seemed rude to wander away to another carriage, so in what was perhaps karma coming back from last week, I found myself stuck with the Boston One-Man Boring People To Death team.
There really was no escape as he bounced from Scotland to immigration to the Iraq War to American history to road-building techniques and back, and his way of shouting over the noise of the train meant that most other passengers in the carriage were watching us as I nodded and "mm'hmm"ed my way through the tidal wave of gibberish that lasted all the way to Davis Square.
Defending against the onslaught wasn't my immediate concern, though. That was the fact that I still had several pages of ZZ Studios up on my computer and had rather been relying on the time on the Red Line to sanitize my Internet history before work. Always plan ahead for this kind of thing.
