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Make Grandma Climb the Escalator

Image: flickr

In a previous post, I lamented incidents when the train operator closes the door too quickly, thereby eliminating all compassion for humanity within my soul.

The customer service problems on the DC Metro don’t confine themselves to the operators of trains though.

A couple of months ago, I saw something that I haven’t had the opportunity to vent about until now.

I was at Rosslyn station and I noticed that for some reason everyone seemed to be getting on the left escalator to go up. I wanted to walk, so I ducked to the right and started on my way.

Now as anyone who’s ever been to Rosslyn knows, the escalator is looooong. It’s not the deepest, but Wikipedia pegs it at 205 feet. I’m winded by the time I reach the top, and I’m in pretty good shape.

As I ascended the stairs, I noticed that a group of senior citizens, about four of them, were on the left escalator. They made it about halfway up, past the elevator, when suddenly their escalator shut off.

I notice this, and immediately feel sympathy. Imagine your grandmother having to climb that many stairs, which is what those people were now faced with, regardless of whether they continued up, or turned to go back down.

As I continued up, I noticed a maintenance worker peek over the top. It turns out that they decided to shut the escalator down to perform some maintenance task on it.

I guess it involves some rigorous scientific analysis to warn people that you’re going to shut off the escalator. It would probably take a Herculean feat of intellectual skill for someone to actually ride the other escalator to the bottom, erect a barrier and wait for all the riders who had made it onto the escalator to reach the top before they shut it off. Maybe it involves complex quantum mathematics to figure out how to turn the escalator back on once you look over and realize that you’ve stranded a bunch of senior citizens in the middle of a no-man’s land that they probably would have taken the elevator to avoid.

I also guess maybe we should start to require advanced degrees in science and mathematics as a prerequisite to Metro employment, then we might actually get better customer service.

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