Apr. 16: On shift for Portland Streetcar today, I noted three Lime e-scooters parked neatly on the streetcar platform at SW 11th and Alder about 12:15 p.m. Though it’s possible for disabled persons in wheelchairs and with walkers to enter from either end of the platform, and there was sufficient room—I believe—to get around these . . . technically, they were parked in the disabled access and pedestrian right-of-way to the streetcar stop.
While I was photographing and documenting them for notification of my bosses, and the complaints I will file with PBOT and Lime, a young woman walked up and and asked me to explain how to use one. I don’t know, because I’ve never used one and I never intend to, I replied. But I want to try one out and I don’t know the rules, she said.
Well, you should have a bicycle helmet, do not operate it on the sidewalks, etc., etc. I don’t see bike lanes on many of these streets, she said; what do I do? Just ride it in traffic, I said. But what if I hold up cars, she persisted. Look around, I responded; how fast is traffic going downtown? If you fear you’re holding up traffic, pull over to the curb for a moment.
I proceeded to tell her some of the many reasons I feel e-scooters really shouldn’t be in the city at all—I mentioned the fatalities in San Fran and Nashville. You’re scaring me, me said. You should be nervous, I replied, because these are here for a pilot test period, and if riders used them nervously and defensively—with care instead of ignoring traffic laws and regulations right and left—then they might fit into the general transit matrix better.
As it is, I concluded, I see they fill no transit need whatsoever. She said, you’re not helping; I just wanted to try it out. Be my guest, I said. And off she went.
July 25: Interesting shift on the streetcar tonight.
I found and pried off two round black stickers for “Slumnation” on the 022 train. So far as I’m aware, the band has not paid for the on-board advertising.
Around 8:30 I got into a conversation with a young man who was concerned about whether fares worked here the way they do in Budapest, so I explained our system, and then he described the subway in London, which he found a marvel when his company sent him there to work for a month.
I told him my wife and I have not owned a car in 17 years, that I had been militantly anti-automobile as a teen in rural southern Oregon, and I didn’t learn to drive or obtain a license until I was 27. He liked all that, and agreed with my judgment that cars are one of the primary factors that will destroy human civilization as we know it.
After he got off at NE 7th and Holladay, I noticed a man down the car eating ice cream with something that was clearly not a spoon. It was straight and small, but kind of broad, and at first I wondered whether it might be a computer thumb drive. I wandered a little closer behind him and realized it was the butt end of a cigarette lighter! He was not making particularly swift progress with in in consuming his pint of Tillamook salted caramel toffee. . . .
Aug. 15: I watched three women board the streetcar at NW 18th and Lovejoy. One had a Hop card which she duly swiped on the reader, and another was obviously deputized to buy tickets from the on-board fare machine with cash.
I hung back, watching, until the machine rejected her first bill. Then I strode over to her and saw, as she did, that the digital monitor on the fare machine read “full cash-box, please notify driver”—so I told her not to worry about it; this was not her problem.
Then I added: “See what happens when everybody behaves themselves? Cheez!”
Oct. 31: While taking a brief break at the new Portland Streetcar office on the second floor of the building at NW 13th and Lovejoy, I heard the double doors rattling, and looked over to see two small children in costumes at play, screeching and pressing tiny handprints on the glass from the hall side.
When it was time for me to go, I slowly and gently pressed open one of the doors, peered out, and murmured, “Barbarians at the gate”—to which their moms on the hallway couch laughed and nodded.
Nov. 2: During the post-Mobile Music Fest discussion, my boss reported that Portland Streetcar’s Twitter account received a complaint from a rider that she had boarded three different trains this afternoon and every one of them had live country music.
Well, he commented rhetorically, I’m sorry you managed to miss the Brazilian band, the classic rock cover band, and the swing jazz duo Boy and Bean.
Apparently, we live in an era when beggars can be choosers, I remarked.
Andrew admitted this year’s lineup of bands might have been a little country-heavy, but it was good country, he insisted.
Maybe next year we should load up on industrial-techno, I suggested. Or if the President gets reelected, we should to all emo.
[NOTE: That’s the ever-popular Boy & Bean pictured above, and The Likely Stories to the left.]
Nov. 11: Conversations you might hear aboard the Portland Streetcar (because I have):
— “That must be why what’s-her-name is hanging out with Loki.”
— “Maddie?”
— “No, the Whore of Babylon. . . . ”
— “No, the Whore of Babylon. . . . ”
Nov. 11: A conversation on the streetcar, circa 4:30 p.m. . . .
— “How old ya have to be to be an ‘honored citizen’?”
— “I’m a little hazy on that; it’s kinda your call.”
— “I’m a little hazy on that; it’s kinda your call.”
— “I qualify for Social Security.”
— “Well, then, you’re good.” [Note: 65 years+]
— “Well, then, you’re good.” [Note: 65 years+]
— “I just wasted 75 cents, then.”
— “Geez, you’re gonna have to cut back!”
— “Yeah. I’ll have to go to mac’n’ cheese instead of steak.”
— “We thank you for your donation.”
— “Oh, I like to support mass transit.”
— “Sound like a communiss.”
— “Well, I am, sort of. I grew up in Berkeley.”
— “I grew up in Eugene, which is sort of the same thing.”
— “Oh, yeah. I always feel very much at home in Eugene” . . .
Nov. 20: One of the funnier things I’ve seen recently occurred as I was waiting for a streetcar at SW 11th and Alder. I was standing on the platform as a train pulled up that carried a wheelchair-bound human just inside the doors. The rider had a dog on a leash as well: a black lab that was more likely a companion animal rather than a service dog, given its subsequent behavior.
As the doors opened, the dog clamped its jaws on the rubber flange along the vertical edge of the door as it pulled open, growling and pulling at it.
In all the years I’ve ridden and worked for Portland Streetcar, I have to say I never pictured a train as a dog toy. . . .
Dec. 4: On shift with Portland Streetcar this afternoon, for some reason it became very important for me to fish out the rear cover of Atlas Shrugged from behind the system map case in the shelter at SW 10th and Clay, where somebody (perhaps it was Mr. Gaslighting; see streetcar tales, part 2) had placed it . . . and I GOT IT!
Dec. 17: It was a pretty busy day. I took a bus over to Bricks and Minifigs to spend three hours picking Lego pieces out of bins to bag Portland Streetcar Lego kits—our first ever—for holiday gifts.
Between yesterday and today, I filled roughly 50 bags of white, black, and gray pieces (67 items in each), maybe 10 bags of the red and blue (94 items apiece), perhaps an equal number of the clear pieces (which include 22 pieces in each), and 40 bags of the pair of blue and red Legos that carry our Portland Streetcar name and logo.
Shortly after 3:00, the owner offered me the honor of actually building a train model, to make sure his instruction sheets are coherent and user-friendly, but I had already committed to volunteer at an “Impeach and Remove” protest rally across town—to which I had to travel by bus at 4:30—and since the model consists of 225 separate pieces, I didn’t think I could finish one on time, much as I wanted to.
“You don’t get to do the fun part!” he said. That’s okay, I replied; the important thing is to serve the customers. Besides, I’m a writer, so I like a good story as much as anything. I got several out of this project.
Dec. 23: I was on my way home at the end of a streetcar shift and chatting with my friend the operator when a rider came up and anxiously asked me if I could alert her when the train arrived at SW Gaines.
I’ve ridden the streetcar a few times, she went on, but never in the dark. She told me she lived at the Mirabella, a retirement community in my neighborhood.
I sized her up—a tall, lean, elegant, but delicate-looking woman with a cane—and said I’d walk her home. Oh, you don’t have to do that, she said. I know I don’t have to, I replied—I choose to.
After we got off the train, she refused my arm, saying, “I value my independence,” and I chatted her up as we strolled the three blocks to her home. She was startled when I told her I had spent my teens in Coos Bay. Though a Portland native, she had also been a teenager in Coos Bay, though several decades before I lived there. She added, my mother didn’t want her daughters to grow up to marry loggers, though, so she sent me to boarding school in Marin.
She asked me what I did, and I said, writing, acting, voice work, reading literature aloud to live audiences. She sighed and murmured, in another life. . . .
She went on, I married an executive for Standard Oil (who had himself grown up in Klamath Falls) because I thought we’d get to travel the world, but he ended up only being assigned to offices along the West Coast. How boring, I observed, and she laughed.
Then I mentioned a friend of mine she knows—a playwright who also lives in the Mirabella—and she asked my name so she could mention that we’d met. I also told her there’s a photo of me with my wife in the latest issue of the Mirabella’s house magazine, 3550, for volunteer weeding and clearing of trash and leaves in Caruthers Park, and she said I saw that article; I’ll have to read it again.
This is the kind of customer service I most enjoy getting to do.
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