beware the unhealthy

On Monday mornings, after a weekend of neglect and (a case could be made) repression, I expect the 1 train to be on its best behavior. I expect to see a shiny, clean train gliding into the station with a smile on its face, happily greeting all of us commuters who have been trapped in our small neighborhoods all weekend. I am generally disappointed, as I was today, when the train came on time, fine, but without a discernable smile or any noticeable cleanliness.

157th street is always the station I use to gauge how I feel about my commute. This works for me in either direction. Usually, if I am not thinking about it, and the thought pops into my head, hmmm… I’ve been on the train for a while, what station am I at? It is 157th street. It is kind of uncanny. Depending on my mood, it is either, Oh, we’re already at 157th? Or How can we only be at 157th? It is kind of a no-man’s land in my journey – sort of far from home, and sort of far from any potential transfer to another train (I decline to acknowledge the elevator situation at 168th street as a proper transfer). I am stuck on my path at that point. In any case, one stop after 157th street today – at 145th street – the train halted in the station.

The initial (and as it turns out, only) reason for this transgression was that there was a sick passenger and that the train was being held in the station and it was also indicated that it wouldn’t be moving any time soon. The guy and girl next to me got a good laugh out of this. Their situation was one in which (from what I inferred through not having my earphones on) they had known each other, perhaps in high school. Now they were in college and just happened to run into each other. They were never really close, but the guy is cooler than what he used to be, and has lots of Important Things he is doing. The girl was friendly and offered up stories of parties and annoying co-workers. They were happy to be young and made jokes about the train stopping in the station because they were really just getting to know each other as adults and it was not a time to be grumpy. I was not so confined. The thing with the “sick passenger” is this: if the person isn’t in your car (and there is a 90% chance that this is the case) then the reality of the situation does not settle in. So, 90% of the people on the train could not give a shit about this supposed sick passenger, and begin to question whether there is such a person. Then, there is a terminology issue. “Sick passenger” makes it seem like someone somewhere has the sniffles or something like that, which while unfortunate, certainly does not seem to warrant the stopping of an entire train and the inconveniencing of the rest of its passengers. This perception is encouraged by ad campaigns against being the sick passenger, exhorting people who don’t feel well to stay off the train. If the sickness is more severe than the sniffles, or some such ailment, then it would not be useful to tell people not to get on the train if they are “under the weather.” That type of ad only works for people who have the types of illnesses that are common, yet manageable enough so that they can at least attempt to go to work. No ad would ever say, “if you feel like you might catch a heart attack, or a brain aneurism, or spontaneous paralysis, don’t get on the train today.” That would be absurd.

So, we have been trained by the MTA’s very ad campaign strategies to associate the term, sick passenger with a person feeling, “under the weather”, who is distinct from a person who just had a heart attack. But, it might be that someone has had a heart attack, brain aneurism, or sudden paralysis. In fact, it may even be likely, because it would be those types of situations that would necessitate the stopping of a train. These people cannot simply walk off the train and be sick on the platform like a person with a cold could. So then, why not simply announce that “There is a passenger who is immobilized and dying. We will be in the station until proper medical personnel arrive.” This would be alarming, no doubt, but it would also give the rest of the passengers a feeling of purpose, and a feeling that we are not being treated like children. A person with a heart attack is not “sick.” We don’t need euphemisms as commuters.

In any case, after working all of this out in my head, the next announcement made was that everyone had to get off the train and that the train was now out of service. This too was incomprehensible. It was a total reversal of reasoning. Clearly there had been no sick passenger in the first place. Or, the train was being used to transport the sick passenger to a station closer to a hospital? No. They lied, and tried to use a pathos inducing reason to cover their malicious ways. How does a sick passenger become a busted train? And, how does a train that rolls swiftly out of the station with all of its passengers packed onto the platform become out of service? Does out of service mean unable to further transport people because of a technical malfunction (that does not preclude its swift roll out of the sation)?