the 9:30 club

Hear ye, hear ye. Metro employees are hardcore when it comes to allowing the visiting kids into the tunnels before 9:30am on weekdays. My dad tried to get the Rosslyn station master to let him slip through before 9:30 last Thursday. The fifty-one (L and I = LI) was meeting at the Rosslyn Metro near his hotel en route to our Washington Monument appointment. I can picture the station agent simply laughing at his Metro day pass and mumbling something about injury and death to day pass holders whilst chuckling to himself.

The turista flock that descends on D.C. in the summer is no competition (simply food) for the Monday-Friday commuters. It all came to the fore on Friday morning as we swapped from Orange to Red line trains at Metro Center. Anyone who’s been a rail commuter in any city understands the pas de deux performed with fellow commuters (consider yourself to be one person with the ‘fellow commuters’ as the second in this deux). The sight of Ohio tourists bumbling through Metro Center post-9:30 is maddening. They can’t work the escalators, the stairs, or the seats on the train. They can’t figure out why there’s a picture of just how you insert the paper ticket in the machine. There’s much staring about the station, staring at gates, memorizing of maps, and securing of the wide-eyed progeny sporting various university logos from the greater Big 10 and Big 12 flyover regions. If we allowed the Buckeyes into the station during the commute we’d have something similar to Pamplona and that running of the bulls that I love so much – goring, stomping, and killing. I can see the opening of the story on the news wire:

Washington D.C. (AP) The Metro’s meanest commuters lived up to their fearsome reputation, goring two and crushing at least seven people as thousands of lost tourists stood about the narrow platforms Monday in Washington’s annual running of the commuters.

The first of five commuter runs in the weeklong Fourth of July tourist festival involved the suited and business casual '16th and K' commuters, renowned as the most violent fighting commuters in the MetroPlex..

As they charged down the 50-meter route from the New Carrollton train to the Shady Grove train, two of them fell after encountering a lost family from Oklahoma and, appearing to lose their way, turned on the crowd of tourists. Two people from Nebraska were gored

"People stumble and fall in front of you but you have to just keep running, jump, knock them out of the way. It brings back old football days," said John Turner, 38, a homicide detective and Metro commuter from Anacostia.

Maybe not.

Love to all.

T.