By: Robby Ripchord
We here at BeerSlugger.com apologize for the lack of posts lately. You see the Phillies are in the midst of a World Series defense and we have been drinking heavily, waking up late and generally calling out of work for no good reason.
That being said, I was out last Wednesday for the Phillies NLCS clincher against the Dodgers. Eventually a group of friends and I made our way to Center City to celebrate with the masses, bag o’ beers in tow. That’s not what this article is about though.
As I awoke in a strange place, multi-colored polka-dot sheets, a room filled with women’s clothing, I realized i was not at my house. A quick survey of the situation placed me in Manayunk. Great, I don’t live in Manayunk and i obviously did not drive there. So here I am forced to take two different forms of SEPTA transportation back to my domicile.
I have a over-priced crappy omelet at the Manayunk Diner which is situated close to the train station and make my way up the rotting concrete and steel stairs. Before I left I had picked up the latest copy of Philadelphia Weekly and read a great article about SEPTA attendants while I sprawled out like a homeless man on the train station bench.
I always wondered what the SEPTA cashiers in the Subways actually did since, as the article points out and I realized from personal experience, that:
- They cannot give change.
- Most do not sell tokens, at least not all day.
Effectively their job is to take two dollars per rider and press a button. Occasionally they are supposed to help elderly and handicapped individuals get onto platforms and trains.
What I didn’t know is that these same people I see napping inside their booth’s or just plain not there at all are paid $55,000 a year on average. All of the 346 full time cashiers on the Broad Street and Market-Frankford Lines are from the medically disqualified pool. So really if you get hurt/sick on or off the job then you get a cushy job collecting dollar bills and pressing a button for $55,000 a year.
Which would be fine with me except that much of the SEPTA budget is funded by Federal, State and local subsidy’s. So taxpayers are mostly paying for these people to sit on their brains all day. Further, every year or two SEPTA threatens to strike wanting better pay and better benefits. Which is exactly the beauty of unionized labor and government jobs, there’s always a few people that get to sit around and do absolutely nothing to collect a sizable paycheck, have little to no work stress besides showing up and even that is debatable.
Sometimes I’ll be on the Subway and there won’t even be a person in the booth to take my $2. Further they don’t have token machines at every stop. So what is a person to do when a train is coming? Not only is SEPTA losing money by overpaying a person who effectively does the job of George Jetson but it’s also losing money from people who want to pay their fare but have to hop over the turnstile instead.
God forbid we upgrade our outdated token system with a card system like New York or Washington D.C.! Technology which has been employed in these cities since at least 1995. But that’s neither here nor there. Your suggestions and good ideas will be promptly ignored by the SEPTA officials that are taking your tax money to run their Transit Authority.
PS: Thanks to the nice lady who gave me a quarter to take the Market Frankford line home Thursday. I had exact change for two tokens ($2.90) and put a dollar bill and my change into the token machine only to find out that nickels and dimes were not accepted. Then i tried to get my money back and it only gave me the change and not the dollar. So I was left ten cents short of the requisite for a single trip and 25 cents short of the requisite $2.90 for two tokens. Good people are hard to come by in a Subway and BeerSlugger.com salutes you anonymous subway lady. Had it not been for you I would have had to walk my hungover ass home.