North Station is being renovated! Again! Yay! I used to live in Fort Point and my daily commute home would involve walking through South Station and I always found it to be a somewhat more tolerable aesthetic experience than North Station. I grew up on the North Shore and North Station has existed in my memory since I was 6 years old. I can still remember sitting on a wooden bench, watching pigeons and listening to my dad read "The Princess and the Goblin" out loud to me. I remember when the rail company switched owners in the late eighties and the sale took over at midnight on New Year's Eve, stranding hundreds of revelers as the trains went out of service. I remember watching drunken Vietnam vets race their motorized wheelchairs back and forth on the concourse while waiting for a Christmas Eve train home.
Basically, I have a certain nostalgia for the place, with its kamikaze pigeons, tiny restrooms, and Darwinian approach to customer service. It's nice that they are trying to make it into a clone of South Station but I hope it turns out better than the first 7 clones in "Alien Resurrection". .
With that in mind, here are a few simple rules of ETIQUETTE people! So sit up and take a freakin' listen:
1) Do not yell into your cellphone. Do you actually think other people care what your S.O. is making you for dinner?
2) Do not try and program your "groovy" new ring tone near someone trying to read. Especially if that person is me. I will go Chris Farley on your ass.
3) Thank you for having the wisdom to realize that if you attend a "sporting event" at the Garden or Fenway, you will get too twisted to drive yourself back to the suburbs. But that does not excuse you from exercising enough self-control to refrain from drinking so much that you become a helpless, vomiting mess in public.
4) Congratulations on your enormous brood of children! Now try to herd them responsibly so that I do not "accidentally" run into them trying to catch my train. If they are capable of walking upright, (and what child over 2 isn't these days?) please let them do so. Humungous strollers are the Devil's little red wagon.
5) You're trying to close that important business deal with China? That's nice. Please stand still while you do it. Do not wander back and forth with the phone stuck to your ear. John Nash's theories have already been well documented.
6) You see the elderly person standing there? The one leaning on their cane trembling? Yes, that one, next to the woman who looks about 11 months pregnant. Oh, you can't see them because you are sitting there staring at your PSP? Then get the hell up and give 'em the freakin' seat already.
7) Wow, I wish I loved my job as much as YOU do! At least, I figure that's your reason for elbowing other people out of the way at you barrel through the station, staggering under your ginormous backpack. What's in there anyway? A survival kit in case the aliens come today?
8) Unless you are in the army and are being told to march in formation by Lee Ermy, or unless you are currently in the Rose Bowl Parade, I see no need for you and your friends, family or co-workers to walk 4 abreast down the track to your train. Please let me get by you, because you don't want the guy in Rule #7 to hurt you.
9) Please remember that you are buying nothing more than a glorified subway ticket. It is not a plane ticket to Dakar, or a shuttle ticket to the moon. The only question you really need to ask the ticket seller is "How much do I owe you?" Do not quibble over the price like Chris Rock's character Cheap Pete. "How 'bout I pay you 25 cents and I just hang on to the roof?" Pay and get out of the way for the next customer.
10) Those little 2-wheeled suitcases are great for only 2 kinds of people: 1) Stewardesses trying to catch their flight in 3 inch heels, and 2) Your grandmother traveling in from Nebraska. If you are a reasonably healthy adult traveling from the train to the subway. You do not, I repeat, DO NOT have to play Sherpa. Especially with a little cheap-o number that tilts over every three steps, requiring you to constantly come to a full stop to make adjustments. Pick up the damn thing. Carry your stuff like a man, dammit. Or if you are a woman, just shove everything into about 5 little Vera Bradley bags like everyone else.
That is all, enjoy your trip, and THANK YOU for riding the T.
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