My favorite T employee has got to be the one known to denizens of the orange line as Crazy Lady, who’s in the Stony Brook station token booth a lot of the time, especially weekends. I’ve seen her in Chinatown, too, though. Haven’t ever seen her on the red line. I think they’ve probably confined her to the orange line. Or could be she has demanded the orange line. I bet she’s got orange line pride. They probably have profiles for each of the lines. They take one look at you and assign you a line.

“But, I’d rather work on the red line, sir.”

“You’re not red line material, son. You’re obviously blue.”

“Actually, I’m quite happy nowadays, since I started on the St. John’s wort.”

“No, I meant your coloration has an icy nuance. Intrepid. Distinctive. You’re a Winter, son, and Winters are intense and rich in their coloring and have the best profile for power dressing because they look great in all the power colors. Black. Navy. Charcoal. Blue line. To the left there. Next!”

Crazy Lady sure hates it when you’ve got a pocketful of change for her, doesn’t she? Starts twitching. She hissed at me once. Glad there was that bullet-proof glass between us. You thought it was there to protect them, I bet.

The thing about the Stony Brook T coin machine thing–you know the contraptions that stand next to the booth where you can drop in change if you’ve got it instead of having to exchange your change for a token–is that its funnel shape has been altered so that you can’t just toss it all in at once. You have to drop it in one coin at a time. I guess maybe it was getting jammed with coinage, so they just went and lopped the funnelly part right off.

I usually save up all my coins over several months and then try to get a whole month of rides out of ‘em. But only the nickels and dimes, on account of there’s a coin-op washer-dryer in my building that only takes quarters. That’s a royal pain in the keister, let me tell you. A whole month can go by before I collect enough quarters to wash everything. I’ve been going commando now for about three weeks as it is.

So I just gather up my fare for the day in the morning. I count out all those nickels and dimes ahead of time. I don’t have a little coin purse or anything, but, if it’s just round-trip I’m going, the “there” fare goes in my right pocket, and the “back” fare in my left, so I don’t have to count it all out again. I always do anyway, but theoretically. And on the walk to the station, I enjoy that sound of jingling coins. It makes me heavier, but somehow I feel lighter. Isn’t that funny?

I’m going back to Florida for a week in the middle of the month, so I decided to forego the pass this month. I mean, add it up. For your basic subway pass, you spend 528 bucks a year. That’s not exactly chump change. I mean, yeah, it’s relative, but still. As for the cost effectiveness of the pass—usually I wring every last penny out of it, for sure, but a lot of times during the weekend I don’t use the T at all—most of my friends have cars. And then if I’m gone for a week…

I mean, here’s the math. $44 worth of tokens would buy you 35.2 rides. So anything above and beyond that is presumably a bargain. Not really, but never mind. At a minimum, most people take the T five days a week, to and from work (or “work,” like me), which, without the pass, is $1.25 one-way. $12.50/week. Four weeks in your average month, which adds up to fifty bucks. With the basic monthly subway pass the same trip costs 15¢ less. You’re paying $1.10 a trip. So you’re already getting a deal. It ain’t 85¢, but you can’t have everything. But if you figure three weeks, the pass is no longer cost-effective. Turns out to be regular fare then.

Of course, it’s better not to think about it. Just buy the pass and forget about it. But it eats at ya. That $528. That’s over 2000 packets of Ramen noodles. Over 3,500 Durex Chocolate Passions Condoms. 5,280 tootsie pops. 6,800 Viceroy Special cigarettes. Sure, that $528 buys you a little convenience on a weekday morning, but what are you giving up? Think about it.

Another shout-out to Dani B., who along with the inimitable liz has come through yet again on the issue of “recycling” doors. Do you think that if you lost a limb in a non-recycling door and sued the MBTA you would still have a case? Shouldn’t they be more explicit as to the exact nature of the threat? How about some little stick figures, at least? And do they at least recycle the severed limbs?

There are signs, in orange line trains at least, that say something like, “your tax money pays to clean these trains,” and then instructs you to clean up after yourself anyway. Do they pay a piece-rate to rag-pickers or something? Saying they pay someone to clean the trains would seem to encourage littering, wouldn’t it? I mean, when I was growing up my mother never said, “the maid is coming, so clean up your room!” For years I thought we actually had a maid who always had the day off. One day I realized that we didn’t have a maid at all, and that my mother was being sarcastic, and referring to herself as “the maid” because she felt like her sons treated her like one. That was a sad day, but I guess I learned a valuable lesson.

So is that what the T is trying to say, or what?