Their Rabbit-Ass Mind

The 24-hour-a-day MTA pays clerks to sit in stations that don’t provide service all night. Daily News notes outrage:

The TA spends more than $100,000 a year to keep people in booths around the clock at the 145th St. and 148th St. stations on the No. 3 line – even though the last train leaves 148th at 11 p.m. on weekdays.

The first train doesn’t pull out until after 5 a.m. the next day.

Yet unharried clerks sit in their cubicles during those quiet hours, as well as on the weekend, when trains run even less often.

That’s 45 hours a week per station when clerks can sell you a MetroCard – but you can’t catch a train.

“It’s very quiet, and that’s how I like it,” a clerk at the 148th St. station said just past midnight one recent morning. “I get paid by the hour, not by commission, and somebody has to mind the store.”

The top rate for a token booth clerk is $22 an hour.

And for that investigative touch, the News stayed up all night monitoring the scene:

A night spent in the station revealed a few interesting characters in predawn New York. It also was a battle against boredom that the clerk had mastered. He mixes a small amount of paperwork with listening to the radio, reading newspapers and talking to other clerks on the telephone.

. . .

12:35: The last No. 3 train to Harlem pulls into the station about 10 minutes late. Seven riders get off. They pass two men on a bench on the otherwise vacant platform.

One man is hopelessly drunk, his head cocked so far back that if his eyes were open, he would be staring at the ceiling.

The other is Alexander Martin, who takes out a Styrofoam container of fast food and proceeds to have an early-morning snack in the sweltering heat.

1:00: Martin shuffles up the stairs from the platform and pushes through a turnstile and stops with a look of total confusion. A subway car cleaner just told him the next southbound train wasn’t pulling out until 5:03 a.m.

Martin, meanwhile, explains that he fell asleep on a train and missed his stop.

1:25: Martin is still outside waiting for a shuttle bus. “And for this they want to raise the fare,” he said. “The gotta be out of their rabbit-a– mind!”