{"id":309,"date":"2005-07-25T07:54:24","date_gmt":"2005-07-25T15:54:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2005\/07\/their_rabbit-ass_mind.html"},"modified":"2008-01-25T13:26:39","modified_gmt":"2008-01-25T18:26:39","slug":"their_rabbitass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/07\/their_rabbitass.html","title":{"rendered":"Their Rabbit-Ass Mind"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

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.<\/p>\n

The first train doesn’t pull out until after 5 a.m. the next day.<\/p>\n

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

That’s 45 hours a week per station when clerks can sell you a MetroCard – but you can’t catch a train.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

The top rate for a token booth clerk is $22 an hour.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And for that investigative touch, the News stayed up all night monitoring the scene:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Martin, meanwhile, explains that he fell asleep on a train and missed his stop.<\/p>\n

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!”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tragicomic_ironic_obnoxious_or_absurd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}