Third in the Time’s Up, TTC series

Of course we know that really the only problem with TTC signage is handwritten signs, particularly at collector booths. Fix those – as by sending a supervisor around to gather them up – and you’ve licked the problem, obviously.

But actually another problem remains: The sheer unrelenting boredom endured by collectors imprisoned in a glass box for eight hours at a stretch. This is one job I want automation to replace.

After a while you develop coping mechanisms. That is, you buy a portable DVD player and stock up on bootleg Chinese discs. Everybody does it. (Check for yourself. Loiter at a subway entrance pretending to fiddle with your cellphone. Observe how the collector is staring fixedly downward and off to an angle.) But you don’t want people looking over your shoulder. One of them might call 416-393-3444, the non-emergency number (emergency is 3555), right on the spot and turn you in.

So you cover up the windows.

Things are so much better since they got rid of those handwritten signs. Except, as we will see, they didn’t.

Today’s photo set

Collectors barricading themselves in booths

Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (q.v.), p. 126:

Two days later, my test results came back from Symons’s office in an exclusively bound [sic] folder designed to assert the importance of their conclusions. Held up against the subtletly [again sic] of the psychological exchanges I had observed between Symons and Carol…, the report felt like it had been written by a computer: “The candidate displays average abilities which would render him well-suited to a range of middle-ranking administrative and commercial posts,” the document began, before it singled out a particular talent for marketing and a weakness with numbers. “His future may lie in one of the following fields: Medical diagnostics, oil and gas exploration, or the leisure industry.”

I recognized my desire to submit to the report’s conclusions in the hope of quelling my doubts about my future.

Botton is the acclaimed author of seven books and the son of a Swiss billionaire.

At the same time, the report failed to inspire any real degree of confidence, and indeed, the more I dwel[led] on it, the more it seemed to signal some of the limits of career counselling as as whole. I thought again about the smells of cabbage and swede in Symons’s office.

This immigrant to the United Kingdom uses “swede” in its British sense of “rutabaga.”

That ugly site about New York “media,” Mediabistro, is offering a course for graphic designers. They seem to offer it every two months. Learn how to code your own Web page! (And design it.)

What will you learn? You’ll have to download a PDF of a Microsoft Word document to find out. Isn’t that your first warning? (What’s the filename? _X_OIyjN8QoxAHTXviUs49syKz.pdf.)

Instructor David Tristman will bring you back to the future by teaching you about the following (excerpted):

• Working with text: Headers, paragraphs, linebreaks
• Divisions and Spans
• Opening linked pages in separate browser windows
• Using CSS (style sheets) to format link text
• Image attributes – width, height, “alt text” [I just love the quotes], align
• Creating a table and using tables to control page layout
• Pros and cons of using tables vs. CSS for layout
• Formatting tables – colo[u]rs, backgrounds, borders, size, spacing

I’m just wondering what the pros of table layouts are. But why be so suspicious, I ask myself? If they were good enough for our grampappies, surely they’re good enough for us. Only our grampappies were also using Letraset, X-Acto® knives, PMTs, and a waxer, so perhaps the olden days should just be left behind.

Tristman was born in ’68. He went to Bennington but managed to escape with his balls intact, since he can bench 185. All this and more can be gleaned from his personal site, written entirely in Flash and listed as “©2006.” If the course still interests you, that’ll be $425, please.

Michael Surtees, do not sign yourself up! It’ll only make matters worse.

Second in the Time’s Up, TTC series

With the tremendous crush of humanity filing past the collector’s booth at Christie station, who could pass up an opportunity to make a pressing political point about the – indeed merely a – Ukrainian genocide?

It happened a short 70 years ago and it is surely an issue of crushing and urgent importance to, say, a nearby Korean immigrant eager to buy a few tokens.

This professionally-printed, if not -designed, posterette sat in the vitrine during the graveyard shift for about a week and a half last December. One particular female collector seemed to be the prowd owner and mounter of this placard, though at least one clearly unrelated male collector just left it up no problem during his own shift.

Remember! Ten million died! And what you do is you just go five stations east to Yonge then take the northbound train to Eglinton.

Today’s photo set

Protesting the Holodomor genocide at Christie

Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (q.v.), p. 87:

In Liège, I booked in [at] the Holiday Inn, a concrete block which hovered on the outskirts of the town, seemingly fearful of entering its medieval centre and keenly nostalgic for the architecture of Detroit or Atlanta. In the evening, I ordered a breaded chicken escalope from room service, and ate it whilst sitting on my bed, reading a book on the history of art in the Low Countries. Some time past midnight, I began watching a television program made up of a rolling succession of illustrated personal ads submitted by members of the public, including a baker from Charleroi who was on the lookout for l’amour et un peu plus, a program which continued for several hours deep into an insomniac night and revealed levels of longing that I had not until then suspected from my brief exchanges in this small and fractured nation [Belgium].

Here’s your July 2009 Metropass:

It now contains rock-solid anticounterfeiting features, like a hologram and a sticker. (Except the passes sold by the handful of vending machines TTC has managed to install don’t have the sticker. So those would be the ones you’d want to copy.)

You have to take the sticker off the pass to use it. (Except you don’t have to do that at any automated turnstile or entrance.) How do you know you have to take off the sticker? Well, half the city won’t know that because they can’t understand the instructions. Can you?

This fare media is only valid
if this sticker is removed

Did you have to think about it?

1. What’s a fare media?

   1. Isn’t it a fare medium?

   2. Isn’t it just a Metropass?

2. Who calls a Metropass a fare medium? Somebody who works at the TTC and lives in a bubble?

3. Is it only valid or valid only?

4. Why is this a conditional sentence? The following outcome takes place if you do this action?

5. Why is there nobody, nobody at all, inside this billion-dollar organization who can write a simple sentence, like “Remove this sticker to use this pass”?

6. How many layers of incompetence does an organization need in order to approve an incomprehensible sentence like this one for imprinting on a quarter-million transit passes?

So.

You thought I was done with documenting the abject failure of TTC signage. So did I. But obviously I’m not, because the problem rages on unabated.

You probably think everything is being handled. You probably think that because the greater the evidence I amass (sometimes from TTC’s own documents) that TTC is screwing it up, the greater the TTC’s insistence that everything’s just fine. Because I’m from outside the organization and am not a jumped-up motorman using CorelDraw for Windows, I couldn’t possibly be right.

Instead of admitting it, or not admitting it and just fixing things (a face-saving option always and still available), TTC pushes back even harder. And as a result, the Bloor-Danforth line’s precious design symmetry will be intentionally destroyed. You can blame Susan Reed Tanaka, Adam Giambrone, noted art expert/android Sandra Bussin, Gary Webster, and a host of miscreants. They so resent my rubbing their noses in their own incompetence that they’ll show me! They’ll reassert their authority over their entire transit system by busting up entire subway stations.

Of course I take this personally. It’s meant personally. They’re so incensed with my proof of their own failings that they take the grandiose step of remodelling entire stations exactly their own way, comfortably free of outside influence. Or rationality or history, or responsibility.

Now, why else might you believe the TTC “communications” problem has been resolved? Because they’ve got some guy on Twitter. That isn’t just a joke, it’s a punchline, but it shows just how gullible and shallow people can be. Are you one of them?

Let me explain it to you via analogy: “Twittering” about sunlight cell does not cure skin cancer. Having some guy defend every single thing TTC does, 140 characters at a time, doesn’t fix TTC signs.

Quick: This guy may be issuing Twits from his CrackBerry, but:

• When’s the next bus coming?

• Where do I get the Bathurst bus going north?

• Where’s the Wychwood stop on St. Clair West?

• How many months did it take them to install the ceiling-mounted box signs at Museum station? (Why weren’t there seven identical instances of them, as the original drawings promised?) How’s the upstairs looking at Museum station?

• Why is there perpetually “No information available” on those advertising screens masquerading as information displays?

• How do I get to Greenwood station from Queen and Greenwood? (Did you know you could buy duct tape in flat black? It’s right there on the sign for the bus at Greenwood station. What’s it covering up?)

• Listen to the stop announcements and tell me the name of the station between Rosedale and Davisville. How many words in the name of the station between Broadview and Pape? Does the terminus of that new subway line have one name or two?

• What does that error message say on buses’ next-stop displays? (You have ample chance to write it down, since it shows up every day. Did you know your wristwatch has more RAM than that system does? The error message tells you so.)

• Why does the 92 Woodbine South bus always claim it’s headed to Lake Shore even when it’s hauling ass up Woodbine? (Same goes for 83 Jones and its perpetual stated destination, Commissioners.)

• What are those fare collectors doing when they barricade themselves inside their booths, covering every square inch of glass up to the five-foot mark with TTC maps?

• Why was that poster protesting the Ukrainian genocide installed in the Christie fare booth for a week and a half?

• How many new handwritten signs were posted this week? (Handwritten signs are the problem, right? Once we lick that problem, we can pack up and go home, can we not? And we have in fact licked it, surely?)

I know all the answers to these questions, and I’ve got the pictures to prove it – 2,261 of them, in fact. I can really back up what I’m saying.

So that’s what I’ll be doing during the month of July. I’ll publish new postings on a specific issue that remains unfixed years and years after TTC should have known better. And I’ll post a few additional pictures over on Flickr. Expect those on most days.

Think I shouldn’t be doing this? Well, maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe TTC managers will be so embarrassed and incensed that the Commission will pass yet another resolution that everything’s just fine, but for good measure will order the replacement of all those enamelled metal signs with fake Helvetica on polycarbonate. Such an exercise, easily attainable, would again demonstrate TTC’s supreme authority over its own system, rather akin to an execution in the town square. Shall we consider it a dare?

We’ve been waiting far too long for the Toronto Transit Commission to act like informed, rational, literate adults. We’ve been waiting for them to heed knowledgeable criticism. We’ve waited for them to accept that graphic design is functional, not decorative, and is not the sort of thing only girls and fairies care about. We’ve waited, and waited and waited, for them to fix their defects.

And they haven’t. All they’ve done is put some guy on Twitter.

Time’s up, TTC.

Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (q.v.), p. 313–315:

“No,” he shouted at me, without even raising his head. I explained that I had been driving by the airfield and had been captivated by the peculiar and desolate beauty of the gigantic machines which lay abandoned, and slowly decomposing, in the desert.

“Fuck off. We don’t give tours,” he responded decisively.

Certain that his logic would benefit from being exposed to the deeper wellspring of my curiosity, I proceeded to deliver a soliloquy, a polished but approximate version of which it seems unfair to deprive the reader:

“My desire further to investigate these semi-ruined objects, though personal in nature, nevertheless fits into a long Western tradition of preoccupation with remnants of collapsing civilizations, which can be traced at least as far back as the eighteenth century. It was then that large numbers of ruin-gazers, Goethe among them, travelled to the Italian peninsula to admire the remains of ancient Rome, often by moonlight, deriving solace from the sight of once-grand palaces and theatres now covered in weeds and sheltering wolves and wild dogs. The Germans, always a proficient people in the coining of compound words, invented the term Ruinenlust to describe this new passion. It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth. It stands to reason, therefore, that a visitor to the United States, this most technologically developed of all modern societies, should take a particular interest in the flipside of the nation’s progress. The disintegrating Continental Airlines 747 visible outside of your window seems the equivalent, for myself, of what the Colosseum in Rome must have been for the young Edward Gibbon.”

There was a silence as my companion took in the eloquence, cultural range, and sheer profundity of what I had just said…. But the man was evidently disinclined by nature to pay extravagant compliments, for when he finally spoke, it was to say “Fuck off” again with a resolve which his previous riposte had perhaps lacked – to which sentiment he then added, lest there remain any ambiguity, “Get the hell out of here before I shoot you in the ass.”

Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (q.v.), p. 312:

I went back to the car for a drive around Mojave. However, like many small towns in the American west, it seemed not to have a centre where citizens could gather for fellowship, javelin contests and philosophical debate, as they had done, according to most historical accounts, in Athens in the age of Pericles. There was not even a Wal-Mart.