I Saw a Metro Employee Napping. Should I Have Taken Cell Phone Video?
Yesterday I was on an Orange Line train going toward Vienna, sitting in the back of the train with my bike. Behind me, shut in the rear cockpit, I could see a Metro employee sitting behind the controls, seemingly asleep.
This was the rear of the train, so the only thing that I found disturbing was how amazingly oblivious this guy was to PR. Operator error almost certainly didn't cause last month's Red Line crash, but this seems like a freaking awful time to get caught sleeping on the job.
That said, what would have happened had I taken a cell-phone video of the guy and e-mailed it to Fox 5 or some other arbiter of outrage? For all I know, the guy wasn't actually asleep but deeply bored, to the point of catatonia. He snapped right up at West Falls Church and exited briskly, even saying hey to me as I wiggled my bike out of his way. I can't think of the last time a Metro employee acknowledged me without me forcing them to. So maybe he's not as bad at PR as I initially thought.
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Linked From: August 19th, 2009Our Morning Roundup: Metro Goes Wireless Edition - City Desk - Washington City Paper
7:46 am[...] busiest underground stations.” Project slated for completion by October 16. All the better to tweet when you see a Metro employee asleep at the wheel, dear! Meanwhile, as the Baltimore Sun observes, Metro’s “summer of horrors” [...]
5:11 pm
At least he wasn't texting.
10:30 pm
Hmm, they have operators at the rear of the train?
Maybe he just locked himself in there so he could take a nap?
1:10 pm
I am pretty sure there aren't operators at the rear of the train. We would have heard about a dead one in the accident a few weeks ago if that was the case. And the fact the he got off the train before the end of the line should make it pretty obvious that an operator isn't required to be in the rear.
Sounds like he was just going home and didn't want to ride with the plebes. Occupational privelege. No scandal here.
1:45 pm
It's a new policy to install tail gunners in order to fend off overly ambitious trailing trains.
2:03 pm
More crybabies working at Metro - no surprise. If you don't kill anyone for a few months, maybe we won't be watching you so carefully. Do your job, don't kill anybody, & stop your crybaby bitching.