Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Caltrain inventing issues



I complained once previously about the sometimes cryptic messages that appear on the overhead signs at the Caltrain stations. Remember the whole "train being annulled" thing? This morning's message was definitely not written by that same person.

The above pictures show the message (the bottom row scrolls). Just to be safe I looked up "machical" to make sure it wasn't some obscure word that meant "complicated" (although the "do" word was a pretty big hint that this was not typed by an English major). It turns out that this bad spelling actually appears a number of times on the internet, but it is not actually a word.

Although it might be that Caltrain is just trying to keep us a bit confused, and is purposely making up words to make it harder to work out what is going on.

I love a good (or even not-so-good) conspiracy theory.

That's it - move along...

PS: Our new shuttle driver is driving me crazy. She is not very bright and maybe needs to have her hearing checked - she will ask which building we are going to and about half the time repeats it back wrong. (No, English is not her first language, but confusing Vision 8 with Vision 9 is odd.) In a bizarre effort to make things even more confusing, this morning two different people told her the wrong building and then corrected it ("Wolfe 9. No wait, 8") . She's already challenged and this kind of thing does not make her job any easier. To her credit, she has not run over anything. To her non-credit I have been arriving at work 5 to 10 minutes later than normal as she tries to work out where she is going. The home base is constantly calling her on the walkie-talkie asking where she is and what she is doing which leads me to believe that others have been complaining.

4 comments:

DAK said...

The really pathetic thing is that I read that sign and didn't even recognize that anything was wrong. Didn't see the 'do,' didn't see the 'machical.' That's how used to spellooniness I've become. But they can spell it any way they want, anything is better than waiting for an answer in silence.

notthatlucas said...

dak - you are right; any kind of info is most welcome. What's a bit odd is that this particular train, 101, should have been having breakfast in SF almost two hours earlier (it should have left San Jose at 4:30 AM), so this was pretty old news and really no longer relevant to the commuters currently crowding the platforms trying to work out how this would impact them.

mary ann said...

In a perfect world we would all live about 1 mile from where we work. I don't know why, but I enjoy your commuter posts ~ maybe because I have boring old reliable BART. I think there is a blog just for Muni riders and their experiences, however.

notthatlucas said...

Commute update - tonight there was again a message about train problems. This time it was about the southbound track and seemed to be spelled OK. What I'm amazed about is that there were two issues today, but both were in the opposite direction that I was traveling. This can't be a good omen for tomorrow.