Asshole of the Week
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CinePhillyist
CinePhillyist Reviews... The Men Who Stare at Goats
Dear SEPTA Trolley Driver Who Took Us Home Last Friday:
We supported you during your strike this fall. We didn’t think that your management needed so much more than you.
Unfortunately, your brethren have done a good job at reminding us why a world without SEPTA might not be a bad world at all. Last Friday’s incident was no exception.
Before we go any further, we should tell you, and the readers, that we recently reread Slaughterhouse-Five, and that this incident reminded us of a passage or two in the book. And that keeps us from having to talk about the Holocaust, and also enables us to call you, SEPTA driver, a Nazi, without there being any sort of genocidal connotations.
Because, you see, only so many people can justifiably fit on a trolley. Even if it is rush hour on a Friday. We were lucky: we got on at City Hall and took the last available seat. There were a few people standing in the aisles as we pulled up to 19th Street, but not too many. When we pulled into the station and you saw the number of people standing on the platform, you hollered to everyone: “Move to the back!” We wouldn’t have minded so much if the request began with “please” and ended with “thank you.”
You repeated your command at 22nd Street, and a woman yelled up to you: “We can’t go much farther back! It’s full!” You grunted and started driving again. But then we hit 30th Street, where enough people were waiting for trolleys that there was a line up the stairs. And then about fifty people got on that trolley. Fifty. We found ourselves nose-to-ass (we were in an aisle seat) with a rather large man who smelled like he’d been working on a dairy farm, even though he was wearing a fast food restaurant’s uniform (should we worry?).
But you kept inviting people on.
And when the trolley was so full that you couldn’t shut the doors, what did you do? Not urge the people on the platform to wait for the next trolley, of course! No – this is where the Nazi part comes in. You got out of your seat, stood on the aisle, and yelled “There is plenty of room in the back! Keep moving!” That wasn’t true. We were sitting in the back. Nobody could move, and people were already worried about how they’d get off at their stops.
That same woman yelled at you: “No, there is not more room!”
“Yes there is!”
“Come back here and prove it!”
He changed his tactics: “How would you like it if it was you out there on that platform waiting to get home on a Friday afternoon?”
“It has been me! I wait like I’m supposed to and take the next trolley!”
At that point, you called her the “C” word – the one Eve Ensler tells us we’re supposed to reclaim but which we can’t bring ourselves to use. There were children onboard. We can’t begin to tell you why your vocabulary was inappropriate. Suffice it to say that if your mother was there, she’d have washed your mouth out with soap. And if the FCC was there, you’d be paying off that fine the rest of your life. That was bad enough, but you stood there and stared at the woman (or, in her general direction – she was way in the back, too) until we heard the trolley tracks rattling behind us, indicating that you were actually keeping some of those folks on the platform from getting home on the next train.
We don’t use the word “Nazi” lightly, Mr. SEPTA Driver. But we have no trouble believing that in a past life, you were the prototype for one of Vonnegut’s villains. In the future, we ask that you please remember that people aren’t sardines, that rudeness gets you nowhere, and that the “C” word is probably best left in The Vagina Monologues.
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