No way to run a railroad

We just want to go to Washington. Andy stopped by Penn Station yesterday to buy tickets, and discovered that Amtrak is now requiring each ticket to have the passenger's name. The machines will only sell you tickets with your own name, and there was a long line to buy a ticket from a human being, so he came home.

Today, he went and stood in line and talked to a ticket agent, as requested yesterday. Lo and behold, it now appears that even the ticket agent can't sell him a ticket with someone else's name. We'll need to either go down there together, or call for reservations separately and hope that one of us doesn't get the last seat on the desired train. The whole point of this exercise is to ensure that we'll both have seats on the same train; refusal to sell anyone more than one ticket seems counterproductive.

Granted, they're swimming in customers right now, but three and six and twelve months from now, Amtrak is going to need goodwill again. They're not getting it this way. The policy is bad enough. The real stupidity, the real annoyance, is that nobody at Amtrak seems sure of what the policy is, so the station was full of people who had been told they could buy tickets for spouses or co-workers if they did it in person, people who waited in long lines and then were turned away, because someone changed their mind in the last 12 hours, and couldn't be bothered to post signs explaining the policy of the hour.

That I'm going to have to show ID to board the train seems trivial in comparison, though I can't imagine what anyone thinks it will accomplish. If this is an anti-terrorist move, someone should remind them that every one of the hijackers on Sept. 11th had good enough ID to board a commercial flight.

No way to run a railroad

We just want to go to Washington. Andy stopped by Penn Station yesterday to buy tickets, and discovered that Amtrak is now requiring each ticket to have the passenger's name. The machines will only sell you tickets with your own name, and there was a long line to buy a ticket from a human being, so he came home.

Today, he went and stood in line and talked to a ticket agent, as requested yesterday. Lo and behold, it now appears that even the ticket agent can't sell him a ticket with someone else's name. We'll need to either go down there together, or call for reservations separately and hope that one of us doesn't get the last seat on the desired train. The whole point of this exercise is to ensure that we'll both have seats on the same train; refusal to sell anyone more than one ticket seems counterproductive.

Granted, they're swimming in customers right now, but three and six and twelve months from now, Amtrak is going to need goodwill again. They're not getting it this way. The policy is bad enough. The real stupidity, the real annoyance, is that nobody at Amtrak seems sure of what the policy is, so the station was full of people who had been told they could buy tickets for spouses or co-workers if they did it in person, people who waited in long lines and then were turned away, because someone changed their mind in the last 12 hours, and couldn't be bothered to post signs explaining the policy of the hour.

That I'm going to have to show ID to board the train seems trivial in comparison, though I can't imagine what anyone thinks it will accomplish. If this is an anti-terrorist move, someone should remind them that every one of the hijackers on Sept. 11th had good enough ID to board a commercial flight.

I should have done this sooner

Since I'm going to be leaving tomorrow, I decided to look through my desk drawers this morning, see what was there, under the random bits of paper.

The first thing that I found was lots more paper, not all of it random. I wound up sorting it into three categories:

• take home


• recycle/throw out


• leave here

This is more complicated than it sounds. For example, I hadn't realized that my copy of Lewis Thomas's The Medusa and the Snail was here, and I want to keep that. I'd also forgotten that I even owned Daniel Deronda, and I put that on the "someone take this, please" filing-cabinet-top, because I doubt I'll ever read it, much as I like most of Elliot's other books.

The real problem is sheer quantity. It's amazing how much can collect in two large drawers in a decade. If I'd started this a week earlier, I wouldn't be looking at an over-weight backpack this evening, and giving up on the gym. I also wouldn't be abandoning things like some perfectly decent wrapping paper, which I just won't have time/space to carry home tonight.

Yes, there's tomorrow. But anything I take tomorrow will be carried to Washington, and then home. That's an incentive to pare things down. Also to drag most of it home tonight, including sample issues of the magazine I've spent most of my adult life working on; some random clothing; an issue of Mike Scott's zine Zorn; and my nice business-card stock. (I had a bit of free time, so I redesigned the cards to have my home phone number, and printed out enough to use up the couple of sheets I had left.)

I'm virtually certain I'll leave something behind; the question is whether it will be something important enough to come back for, when I'm no longer on the payroll, given the annoying new building policies about checking ID. Those shoes didn't fit properly anyway.

I should have done this sooner

Since I'm going to be leaving tomorrow, I decided to look through my desk drawers this morning, see what was there, under the random bits of paper.

The first thing that I found was lots more paper, not all of it random. I wound up sorting it into three categories:

• take home


• recycle/throw out


• leave here

This is more complicated than it sounds. For example, I hadn't realized that my copy of Lewis Thomas's The Medusa and the Snail was here, and I want to keep that. I'd also forgotten that I even owned Daniel Deronda, and I put that on the "someone take this, please" filing-cabinet-top, because I doubt I'll ever read it, much as I like most of Elliot's other books.

The real problem is sheer quantity. It's amazing how much can collect in two large drawers in a decade. If I'd started this a week earlier, I wouldn't be looking at an over-weight backpack this evening, and giving up on the gym. I also wouldn't be abandoning things like some perfectly decent wrapping paper, which I just won't have time/space to carry home tonight.

Yes, there's tomorrow. But anything I take tomorrow will be carried to Washington, and then home. That's an incentive to pare things down. Also to drag most of it home tonight, including sample issues of the magazine I've spent most of my adult life working on; some random clothing; an issue of Mike Scott's zine Zorn; and my nice business-card stock. (I had a bit of free time, so I redesigned the cards to have my home phone number, and printed out enough to use up the couple of sheets I had left.)

I'm virtually certain I'll leave something behind; the question is whether it will be something important enough to come back for, when I'm no longer on the payroll, given the annoying new building policies about checking ID. Those shoes didn't fit properly anyway.