Turnstile Jumping on the Green Line

I had an unpleasant encounter with a transit cop this morning. Walking into Copley station, inbound, I came down the stairs to see a line at the token booth being slowed by a young man talking with the clerk about something - directions maybe.  I recognized the clerk as the surliest MBTA employee I know; she is truly nasty.  There were perhaps four people in line waiting to buy tokens, but no one seemed in a hurry because there were no trains nearby.  Fortunately, I already had a token.

With my $1.25 token in hand, I approached turnstile #3 and dropped it into the slot.  Moving forward with purpose, I bruised my thighs on a recalcitrant turnstile arm.   It would not budge.  Annoyed, I jumped it.  Clumsily.  I heard a sarcastic male voice from behind me, "Did that hurt?"

Thinking that a flippant comment from one of the men in line at the token booth who had watched my clumsy hurdle, I gave a flippant retort, along the lines of, "No.  It missed the sweet spot," without turning around.

As I continued to walk ahead to the platform's edge, something was said or done that made me stop.  I don't remember what, but I turned and saw an angry, red-faced, thirty-something, MBTA cop striding through the gate toward me.  I knew at once what he had seen, and what he must have thought: that I didn't pay.  The first words out of my mouth were, "I paid."

He didn't believe me at first, and was angry out of proportion to the offense he thought I'd committed.  Now, I'm not wearing a suit today, but I am wearing a jacket and tie and a blue wool topcoat, and I look perfectly respectable, so the officer should have had a clue that I'm not a fare thief.  I could see that he hovered somewhere between certainty that he was going to pursue enforcement action, and uncertainty about whether I had really skipped the fare.

He asked me why I didn't just walk to the window and have the collector open the gate.  Because I didn't want to wait in line and it wasn't convenient to deal with the surly attendant, I thought, but I said some polite version of that, not mentioning the attendant at all. He didn't like my answer, I could see, and I knew the shortest way out of this was to apologize. "I should have gone to the gate.  I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cause any trouble," was exactly what I said, contritely.

It worked.  His uncertainty resolved, he walked away to deal with whatever had summoned him down there in the first place, which I soon learned.  The turnstile was sticking, people were jumping it, and the token clerk was calling them in as fare evaders.  I learned all that from the shouting match the MBTA cop got into with a businessman who had witnessed not only my encounter, but apparently the token clerk's encounters with people as well, and was not happy about the MBTA's efficiency or customer service.  So the MBTA cop should have known, or did know, that the problem was an MBTA one, not one of rampant miscreancy.

What he was really doing was chasing a call, early in his shift or late in it, that he didn't want to be chasing.  He came at it with a head of steam, and just needed to vent a bit before being cooled by my apology.  I'm used to defusing angry situations.  Remember, I used to be a cop.  I'm glad it went that way.  I don't think my government bosses would be too happy if I were detained by the police.  (Come to think of it, I'm not at all sure what the penalties and enforcement authority are for fare evasion.  They may be pretty weak.)

Just another morning on the Green Line.