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Apartment Hunting Nightmare #1

16 Mar

March 16, 2015

Picture this: An affordable apartment in a great neighborhood. You agree to meet the landlord at 1:00 and get there early. By 1:20 she isn’t there. So you call her back and she tells you that she was there, didn’t see you, and left. That doesn’t make sense since you were sitting in your car right in front of the place and never saw her, but this time you get out and stand in the doorway, in the rain , so she doesn’t miss you. A few minutes later she arrives and you go upstairs with her where she tries to unlock the apartment door and fails. The door has a brand new lock, for which she has the key, and a very old lock, for which she doesn’t have the key. She tries to open the door again, you try to open the door, and eventually you both give up. You leave, never having gotten to see the apartment.

True story.

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Imponderable #125: The Metrocard

9 Mar

March 9, 2015

I don’t ride the subway that often, so it was a little surprise that when I went to refill my Metrocard, the machine said that it was about to expire and couldn’t be refilled. Used to be they didn’t expire.  The machine gave me the option of replacing my card, which I did. It gave me back my old one, then gave me a new one I could put money on. I filled the new one and threw the old one away.

This is really ridiculous. One of the benefits of the Metrocard is that it is refillable, therefore you use less of them, and fewer end up in the trash (or on the floor of the subway station, more often.) But here they just gave me a new one and forced me to throw the old one away, when the simpler option was to just add more time to the old card. It would have saved the use of a new card and kept the old one out of the landfill.

What’s up with that, NYC? Huh?

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By the way, when I was in High School, the Metrocard was just being tested and was only in use in a handful of stations. Students used to get a subway pass that they had to show the guy in the token booth, but one year they moved to Metrocards, which doubled as passes since most stations weren’t yet equipped for them. I still have the first few I was issued, so I have some of the very first Metrocards ever made (as I’m sure thousands of others do too. I’m pretty sure they aren’t worth anything.)

 

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