Coronavirus procedures practiced by Valley Metro, the mass transit company here in the Phoenix metropolitan area, focus on the safety of drivers and all passengers by boarding customers through the back doors on the busses and not allowing them to sit on the seats nearest the driver on lightrail trains. To save time on bus routes, anyone wishing to ride, while they do have to show a valid pass, only need to prove they’re a client by flashing their pass to the driver. The scanner that electronically checks the date of validation isn’t being used. In fact your valid fare doesn’t even need to be validated which process is performed by said scanner or at a fare dispenser at many boarding stations and stops. The date is mechanically printed on your pass — a plastic card that can easily be creased. I have been using a pass I paid for when the pandemic procedures began being practiced a couple weeks ago. The date on it was for April Fool’s Day. It wasn’t considered expired even on days I rode that were well into the month. Until today.
Security officers are usually assholes. They feel better about passengers they don’t like by torturing them as the Catholics and Mormon Prophet encourage them to. They force busy people to miss connecting trips by scrupulously enforcing crosswalk signs that no one pays attention to when they’re not around. Causing timely travelers to be late, they kick people off rides for single occurrences of relatively harmless infractions such as vaping. Some of the more Nazi-like employees won’t allow breathing as simply sticking a vape mod in your mouth without hitting the fire button and drawing air into your lungs is interpreted as a smoking violation. These hypocrites ironically enough, allow the more penny-clinching nicotine addicts who want to splurge on filtered smokes to still somehow manage to pennypinch by allowing them to bring along a half-smoked cigarette on board stinking up the already musty-aired vehicle. As if one wrong made a moronic regulation right. Skunky pot smokers are warmly welcomed with their brand of half-smoked cigarettes. Hell, I’ve even seen happy hours where several passengers pass around a bottle of hard liquor and take swigs that splash their way onto the floor thereby creating a slip hazard. But Polar Pops do not have lids proper for travel forcing soda pop drinkers to chug like the non-stigmatized alcoholics as the bus is arriving. Such is what the Mormon Prophet commanded.
And they don’t even do their job. They never check for reduced fare identification thereby condoning filthy rich passengers who work per the Prophet’s approval getting away with only paying the discounted fee that the disabled get to pay. Before Coronavirus, when they checked dates on passes, they would never fine transit thieves who didn’t even have a pass. A pass that hasn’t been validated? No problem, Robin From The Hood. The officer would just double up as a fare scanner and take a marker to mark the date on your dateless card (getting paid time-and-a-half in doing so). Meanwhile, the sneaky thief would play the part in listening to a dumbass with a power trip advising to validate the pass as soon as possible. Like when? Like never. They just keep riding for free. I’ve found discarded passes with multiple Sharpie scribblings revealing the multiple dates the criminals were advised to validate their pass. Doing so would render the fare expired at 3 a.m. the next morning. Yet law-abiding releases from jail who served their time for a past crime trying to catch a complimentary ride get denied a much needed trip back home. At 3 a.m. in the morning. I wanted to take my shoe strings and tie them around the merciless driver tightening them until he suffocated while he choked on his Polar Pop. You’re not Robin Hood, asshole. You’re just robbin’ from the good. At that they are the best.
Discriminating to boot, mentally disabled passengers eligible for reduced fare always get asked for reduced fare identification usually because of their cosmetic surgery. (Cripples and crutches need not bother.). If the driver can’t see the disability then the shit must not be there. Even if I have to be there by 8 in the morning. To my internship, that is. “You’re going to have problems if you try to board my bus,” is what the Gestapo agent asserted to me on my first day to work even though I had my Medicare card which technically proves my eligibility.
The Lamanite Magician 