| rev:text
| - When choosing a career that puts you in a position of helping the public for a living, One of the first things that should be ingrained into you is, despite your position of power over the lowly masses, you are not in the business of teaching people lessons. I've long been* someone who travels on GoTransit for work or for social reasons, and never have I encountered more people hellbent on teaching people lessons than the people who sell tickets for, and drive the Go Trains. Generally speaking, commuters find themselves at GoTrain stations because they have somewhere to GO. But, the attitude from behind the glass, atop the padded ergonomic chairs of the average GoTransit employee (books at the ready, snacks half eaten) is they can't believe the audacity of people to ask that they do their job in a timely manner. If you're not there 10-15 minutes early, you are some how in violation of your duty as a commuter, and you deserve mockingly bad service for being in any sort of rush. I recently was chastised by a particularly surly member of the staff for swiping my debit card "too fast", and sent to another window. What the Hell?
Not being a driver myself, I'm no stranger to other public transportation; taking both TTC and VIA on a fairly regular basis (not to mention the occasional flight). I have always been reasonably pleased with the pleasant, satisfactory customer service displayed by these organizations. Why are Go employees the Public Transportation equivalent of those kids at KFC who video taped themselves putting pubes into KFC meals?
One guy in particular, this motherfucker, I'm convinced is actively trying to ruin peoples days/lives. Every time I go to him, I swear he takes as agonizingly long as possible, smugly giggling to himself all the while as my fists clench and I dream of punching him in his soft, yielding neck. He makes Seinfeld's "Soup Nazi" look like Meg Ryan in an Romantic Comedy. Let me explain...
Typically, I'll come in with 5 minutes to spare, quickly and politely ask for my ticket, covering all pertinent info in my request, and offer a debit card. I intentionally do this with military precision. He'll then wait until I'm finished my request before slowly looking up from his book, sighing, then ask me to repeat my request, put a bookmark in, close the book, ring in the ticket, swipe my card 3 times, yawn, print out my receipt, then his receipt, tuck his receipt away in the proper area of his register, look at his watch, print out my ticket, make a chess move, begin composing a thank-you card to the hosts of a party he attended over the weekend, stack my receipt, card, and ticket in a small pile, re-arrange them so the card is on the bottom, briefly fall asleep, before waking up and handing me my ticket with approx. 20 seconds remaining for me to curse his mother's name and sprint full speed to the waiting train.
Go Transit runs an important and vital service to those living or working outside of the city, and I'm grateful for it. The trains provide a fast, smooth ride, are usually well lit, clean and generally arrive on time (buses are another story, for another time...) But the most difficult and frustrating part of a journey shouldn't be doing something as simple as buying a ticket to ride the train, due to the negative attitudes you encounter from employees.
* I'm actually writing this while on a GoTrain, and at one point the ride got a little bumpy. In meaning to write "Been" I accidentally typed "Beer" and then corrected it to "Beej" before correcting it once more without error to "Been". It was almost like a Ouija keyboard, telling me my inner most desires for the remainder of the evening. Full disclosure: Only one of them came true.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)