More Adventures of a Portland Streetcar customer service rep

I have now worked two and a half years for Portland Streetcar as a customer service representative. The job brings me into steady contact with all kinds of people, from retirees who are comfortably well off or just getting by, to young urban professionals living and/or working in the Pearl, and of course homeless folks . . . some of whom actually show me valid fare.

My experiences and observations amid this constant parade of humanity are wonderful fodder for storytelling on my Facebook page. Last April, I collected up and shared the best tales from 2015. More of course are coming from this year, but I went back and copied the memorable ones from my first six months on the job, from June through December 2014. This was back when streetcar fare was just one dollar for two hours of riding.

Enjoy!

July 23: Encountered a retired couple from Baltimore on the streetcar. They said they had saved “the best for last” on their West Coast swing (second time here). He said, “You know how in New York you say, ‘nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live here’? Well, Portland’s a nice place to visit, and you WOULD want to live here.”

I love this town.

July 25: Tall young dude digging in his tight jeans pocket for his streetcar fare ticket: “It’s in there somewhere.”

Me: “Well, I’m not going in after it.”

Him: (Laughs) “I appreciate that.”

July 27: Older gentleman on the streetcar, reading my vest label: “Customer service? Where’s my margarita?”

Me: “Oh . . . we're outta ice.”

July 31: My friend and fellow book group member Dean Alterman stepped on the car with his dollar bill out and I patted him on the shoulder because the ticket machine was busted. “Enjoy the ride,” I told him.

Then a young man unknown to both of us asked a general question about Trimet, and Dean proceeded to lecture him for several stops about the structure and design of Trimet because Dean’s father (founding partner of the venerable Portland law firm Kell, Alterman & Runstein) was involved in establishing the transit agency. I should also mention that Dean was wearing what amounted to an all-white “ice cream suit.”

The young man got off at the same stop I did and remarked, “I just met the Godfather of Trimet!”

Aug. 15: So a young couple gets on the streetcar at the sports stadiums, and they're loaded down with six or eight backpacks and bags. She plays dumb, saying I thought the streetcar was free. It’s not, I said, but the fare machine on board was busted, so I didn’t give them a hard time.

Four stops later I could tell they were looking for the MAX, but they weren’t going to ask me for help. So I checked with them and they said yes, they wanted to head east on the MAX. They had just missed their stop, and I knew the MAX station was shut down for construction at 7th and Holladay anyway, so I told them to get off at the next stop (NE Grand and Oregon), walk three blocks north on Grand and take a left, to get to the Convention Center stop.

After they’d gotten off and the doors closed, I noticed a fat backpack still on the floor. At first I hauled it to the operator’s cabin and he started to radio it in, but then I thought I could catch them. So I got off at the stop at the south end of the Convention Center and ran north to try to find them.

Well, they were either lying to me about where they were headed or they didn’t trust my directions, because they weren’t at or near the MAX platform where I’d directed them, so it took me about six blocks of searching to locate them.

“Is this yours?” I said, coming up to them. They hadn’t even noticed they were missing it yet. I was so disgusted, I didn’t even want to hear their thanks, so I muttered, “Try to stay alert, folks,” turned and strode off.

Aug. 16: I normally do a three- or four-hour shift, but the power wires went down on the Broadway Bridge mid morning, so streetcar service on the entire east side was dead (and still is). I got involved in guiding backup Trimet shuttle buses along the line and spent 3-1/2 hours giving directions to foot traffic down near OMSI. It turned into a seven-hour shift, with many adventures and interesting lessons along the way.

I had to entertain a family of four that were still jet-lagged from a flight out of Baltimore yesterday and trying to get from OMSI to the International Rose Test Garden. (No easy way to do that by mass transit.) The adults were gently ragging on each other, and the daughters were really tussling. The 9-year-old “didn’t believe” me when I said I am an actor, so I proceeded to recite the first four pages of Ray Bradbury’s “The Utterly Perfect Murder” while the four of them sat on the sidewalk and listened.

Sept. 13: I was waiting on the streetcar platform at NW 11th and Glisan to transfer trolleys and wandered over to the shady side of the street next to the Bedmart. Noticed several small flies and a fairly large moth (probably all dead) caught between a beautiful white pillow hanging in the window and the glass, so I wandered into Bedmart to let the employees know they might want to remove those unsightly details from the window display. Gosh, a female worker said; we’ve only had those up a couple days. Your pillows have been driving too fast on the highway, I suggested.

Sept. 21: Of course lots of commuters this morning wanted to know if the SW streetcar corridor will be running again tomorrow, after being down for a week due to construction. The Trimet Road Supervisor said we do everything we can to make the schedule: “We burn incense, we offer prayers. . . .” I added: “sacrifice virgins . . . ”

You can tell I’m a real spiritual guy.

Sept. 26: It was a long, slow, lonely shift down at the SE Stevens turnaround for the Portland Streetcar this morning. Just before I knocked off, a little dark-haired kid waved through the window from the streetcar that was just about to pull out. I waved back, pressed up against the glass to amuse him and his brother, then ran alongside the train as it left the platform, keeping up with them on the outside of the train until I pretended to collide violently with a light pole. The skinned forearm that resulted was entirely worth their amusement.

Oct. 5: I suppose if you stand on any downtown street corner for a while, you can observe stupid behavior, but for the 5-1/2 hours I was on duty this morning directing traffic at the Broadway Bridge closure, NW 9th and Lovejoy was a pretty good location for Idiot Central.

I expected the cursing drivers, and the befuddled drivers, bicyclists, and pedestrians; what I was not expecting was the car that barreled through the intersection straight for me and snapped the wooden barricade I was standing behind just as I leaped out of the way. 7:37 a.m. close call.

Oct. 25: Kind of an eventful shift this morning on the Portland Streetcar. An operator (small woman) and I got into a fight with a woman who slammed me with a lot of ’tude when she admitted she had no fare, and had a BMX-style child’s bicycle.

Since I’m a customer service rep with no enforcement authority, I’m trained to avoid confrontations, but when the operator came roaring out of her cabin to throw the insolent rider off the train, I felt I had to back her up.

The would-be rider spat (or pretended to spit) on the operator, who was so mad she was shaking. A guy on the platform took the side of the contemptuous and abusive passenger, shouting cautions and citing legalities at us (although his girlfriend was trying to keep him out of it), then trying to pry open the doors of the train when the operator closed them to shut him out.

Once we were rolling, the driver told me the feisty passenger had been thrown off streetcars many times. She never has fare, she often holds the doors open for homeless buddies, and regularly brings a big pit bull on board and lets it sit on the seats.

Oct. 26: Dear grumbling and cursing drivers (and a shout-out to the guy who flipped me off): You do realize that you live in a city with more than a half million other folks, many of whom do not precisely share your needs and desires? These fun runs are scheduled at a time, day, and route that is calculated to inconvenience the fewest non-runners. (I'm sure the average runner would prefer not to have to get up at 6 a.m. or so on a Sunday morning for a half marathon that starts at 7:45.).

But I’ve always aspired to be an ogre, and clearly an unfeeling and arbitrary universe selected me to ruin your morning. So there ya go.

Oct. 26: The tall young blonde in the short skirt and blouse (no jacket) had tripped over one of the traffic islands at NW 10th and Lovejoy shortly after 8 a.m. on a Sunday. I didn’t see it, but the guy who was volunteering to monitor the fun run alongside me to raise money for his daughter’s ballet school made sure she was all right.

Watching her totter off on her shiny gold spiked heels in the cold, dark, rainy morning, I joked: “Appropriate outfit for a Sunday morning; suppose she’s headed to church?” The man, who had moved his family up from Medford not long ago, set me straight: “Heading home from a friend’s. Walk of shame.”

Oh. Sometimes I’m a little slow.

Nov. 17: I was doing the TriMet short survey about 9:45 tonight when a young, well dressed professional woman started to harangue me about what a lousy job the city was doing, there are so many homeless people who haven't paid fare riding alongside her, and why don’t I harass someone else about paying.

Only I hadn’t asked to see her proof of fare; I merely wanted to know which stop she intended to get off at, like everyone else on that train. I thanked her for her feedback and told her I was listening to whatever else she had to say, but she told me to go bother somebody else. She couldn’t finish most of her sentences, and I thought that was because she was so disgusted and angry.

A little later, another passenger sidled up to me and told me she appeared to be “dead drunk”: He had watched her weave up to the platform where they had boarded, and hang onto a lamppost to stay upright. Very professional handling of her, he added.

When she disembarked, she fell down the steps, but apparently wasn't hurt, standing at Moody & Gibbs to re-gather whatever dignity she retained. But she had left her iPad on the train, so when we came back through the turnaround at Lowell and headed north again, we kept an eye out for her, and the operator allowed me to hop off between stations to return it to her. As my sweet revenge for her diatribe, I handed her iPad to her with “Here you are,” and ran back onto the train before she could murmur anything more than “Oh my god. . . .”

Dec. 1: Fun and games on the streetcar. Conducting the Trimet short survey this afternoon, I asked a woman which stop she planned to get off, and she said she would have to be paid for that information. I was so startled by her response that I smiled and said, I’ll just watch you until you get off, then; whereupon she asserted that this would be a constitutional invasion of her privacy(!).

Then she began to lecture me on how she pays her fare (which certainly doesn’t cover the cost of operating the trains), and one time the Portland Streetcar didn’t bother to take a train offline when the disabled access ramp wasn’t working. (She wasn’t in a wheelchair; she was ambulatory -- but very large -- and dragging a small empty grocery cart which I suspect she could have lifted or pulled into and off the train without assistance.) I don’t know whether I was more amused or irritated by her combativeness and overinflated sense of entitlement.

When I perceived where she was preparing to get off, I studiously gazed in another direction until we’d pulled far away from the platform. An older, courtly black gentleman beckoned me over to commiserate and informed me that she had flipped me off from the streetcar platform.

Then there was the lean man who appeared to be "on something" and assiduously searched under every single seat on the trolley car as we rolled across the city. I wasn’t sure whether he was looking for individual grains of tobacco or a pot of gold the state lottery might have planted somewhere on a Portland Streetcar.

Dec. 5: “Oh, the sun’s out,” the woman visiting from Texas said on the streetcar about 2:45. “That's weird.”

“It’s just a mirage,” I assured her. “They do that for the tourists.”