>>> [BBS THREAD: FREE FARE DAY: best eleven hours of my life (long post, sorry not sorry)]
[THREAD STARTED BY: /RubyRose] 2075-02-14

/RubyRose

OK SO. tuesday i rode the Brown Line from Kimball to the Loop, then the Red Line to Howard, then back down to 95th, then BACK, and i did not tap ONE THING. the gates just stood there with their little arms up like a crowd at a concert. i'm not saying i cried at Clark/Lake but there was a guy playing a saxophone at noon and i felt something

nine stops in a row a stranger handed me a pastry. NINE. i have never been so loved by a city

anyway if you missed it, you missed it. i'll be insufferable about this for years

/Ledger

Duration was eleven hours and four minutes, not "the whole day." Gates opened at 0612 and the system came back at 1716. I logged it.

The cause was one kid, fifteen, working out of his aunt's apartment in Albany Park. He got into the fare vendor's back end, locked the gate network, and demanded a lifetime pass and a specific brand of game console. He sent the demand to the vendor's general support address. That address has been unmonitored since a restructuring in 2073. The demand sat there unread the entire time. No one has confirmed whether he ever checked for a reply.

/RubyRose

YOU LOGGED IT. of course you did

/Ledger

Somebody has to.

/Abuela_Diesel

Free rides are fine. Let me tell you what else the free rides did.

I have a nephew who does drone dispatch for one of the fare-enforcement contractors. Those officers, the ones with the little tablets and the sad shoes, were told to stand at their posts and "observe" all day. No fines, no stops, nothing to do. By evening they were sharing sandwiches with the people they normally ticket. Wednesday morning the contractor sent every one of them a termination notice for "productivity failure." Eleven hours of the only easy shift they ever had, and then the bill.

Also somebody was crushed at Clark/Lake around 1600 when the platform jammed. It was one person. I'm told the transit authority's count of injuries is zero because the gates weren't logging anything. Somebody's cousin knows a name. I'm not passing it on until the family says I can.

/Cubicle_9

Just asking questions. The badge readers at my building are apparently on the same vendor's system. For about six hours Tuesday morning our lobby turnstiles stayed open and nobody could log who came in. Security pulled a chair in front of the door and called it "manual monitoring."

Also, a guy in a delivery uniform walked out with a monitor stand and a plant. Is that... a breach? Should I report the plant?

/Small_Talk

The plant got out of being a corporate slave. Let it live.

/Ledger

Do not report the plant. Report that your employer's security response time was under a minute before the vendor failure and six hours after it. That's the finding.

/Cubicle_9

Right. So, a chair. The chair is our response time.

/Ghost_Lake

I've been thinking about "why eleven hours."

If a fifteen-year-old wanted to prove a point he'd keep it open until they paid him. If he wanted a game console he'd have pulled the plug the moment the demand bounced. Eleven hours and four minutes is a schedule, not a tantrum. Someone chose the window.

Now think about who benefits from a stretch of the Loop where nothing logs entry or exit, on a weekday, for the length of a full shift. Nobody moved through that on foot by accident. I'm not saying the kid didn't do it. I'm saying somebody may have told him when.

/Ledger

Unsupported.

/Ghost_Lake

Unsupported yet.

/RubyRose

oh my god. i got a free pastry and Ghost_Lake found a conspiracy. i'm going back to bed

/Abuela_Diesel

Update from the aunt's building, which is where half my day went. A man in a good coat came by asking after "the nephew" on Wednesday. He wasn't the vendor and he wasn't a cop. The aunt says he was very polite and left a card, and the card has a name but no company.