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| WSJ Aticle on NYC Station Agents (497935) | |||
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WSJ Aticle on NYC Station Agents |
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Posted by RonInBayside on Wed Oct 3 09:20:45 2007 A Helping Hand,A Friendly Smile -- New York Subway? Machines Now Sell Tokens, So Clerks Struggle With Job Of Being Nice to Commuters By BARRY NEWMAN October 3, 2007; Page A1 NEW YORK -- When subway tokens were brass, the clerks who sold them were faceless mumblers behind bars, and later scowling mumblers behind bulletproof glass. Chitchat wasn't in the job description. Then out went the tokens and in came machines that sold plastic tickets. All of a sudden, subway token clerks were being ejected from their unsociable bubbles with instructions to kibitz. One recent consequence, for a businessman passing through a turnstile, was that Carmine Dargenio approached him from behind and adjusted the accidentally upturned collar of his pinstriped suit. "You get a rapport," said Mr. Dargenio, who is 59 years old and lives alone in Staten Island. He stood on duty at the Rector Street entrance to the R train in lower Manhattan. Hammered-together boards and a puddle blocked one stairwell. In the old token booth where he is permitted to rest for 10 minutes an hour, a note taped to the wall by a previous occupant read: "There are rats in the booth. They are in the ceiling." Carmine Dargenio aides subway passengers in the Rector Street Station in Manhattan. "That particular gent," Mr. Dargenio said, recalling his collar adjustment, "I don't know his name. I know he has grandchildren. They live in Atlanta. Of course, New Yorkers are..." Just then, a train came thundering into the station and drowned him out. Over the past two years, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and its subway subdivision, New York City Transit, have closed down 158 token booths, nearly a quarter of the total in a system that sells five million rides a day. The booths are still there, but now they are called "kiosks." And now 600 unseated token clerks like Mr. Dargenio have become "roving station agents," a less-than-voluntary corps of subterranean official greeters. Except the subway isn't Disney World. By turns it's a hot, cold, lonely, mobbed mass-transit museum of begging, mugging and flooding. Emergencies are numerous and diversions continuous. The maps are indecipherable, the loudspeakers incomprehensible. Straphangers get mad, and they take it out on the face in the glass booth. A 2005 Cornell University survey of station workers found that 81%, while on duty, had put up with verbal or physical threats from customers. But for the roving clerks, customer service on the subway isn't bulletproof anymore. Their defense now is personal attitude modification. "When you're inside the booth, nobody can get to you, hit you, spit on you," says Adriana Carney, a rover at Wall Street on the Lexington Avenue line. "Whatever problem they have, they'll go away. Eventually. Now that I'm outside, people say, 'You're so nice.' I tell them, 'You haven't seen the other side of me.'" In 2003, when the MTA announced that some booths were on their way out, the plan was to sack the clerks. The Transport Workers Union went to court and forced public hearings. The public turned out to be so scared of being alone in unstaffed stations that the MTA backed off. With computers in charge, it looked at first as if the cast-out clerks would just stand around smiling. It hasn't worked out that way. The MTA's computers have foul tempers, too. One evening rush hour at 34th Street on the Seventh Avenue line, commuters crushed up to a ticket machine while Azoy Sarkar, in a maroon rover's vest, bobbed in back shouting, "Need help?" A woman stood staring at the display, a $20 bill in hand and a finger poised to buy a $2 ticket. Mr. Sarkar cut into the scrum, stayed her arm, and pointed to a note in the screen's corner: "Maximum change $6." That's one surprise. Among others: the "no bills" notice halfway through a $70 purchase; the nine-step process for adding $5 to a senior pass; the cash-eating mechanical jam resolved (only with a receipt) by mailing in a form and waiting for a refund. Now that they no longer make change, rovers supply tech-support and psychiatry. After the woman came up with a $5 bill for her $2 ride, Mr. Sarkar personally escorted her to the turnstile and delivered her to the uptown local. Over the next hour, he rescued a dozen more riders trapped in ticket-machine limbo. He told them all: "On behalf of New York City Transit, I apologize." Throughout it -- as buskers drummed, "incidents" halted train service twice, and thousands of commuters stormed past him into Penn Station and beyond -- Mr. Sarkar answered questions, a hundred of them: Which way to the Port Authority, to Chelsea Piers, to the Empire State Building? Even, "I need to catch a train in one minute, and I need you to tell me which way to go!" "Met, MoMA, Macy, I know everything," said Mr. Sarkar. He's 35, an immigrant from Bangladesh, and a former taxi driver delighted to be on the public payroll; rovers can make more than $50,000 a year, plus benefits. "If you love this job," Mr. Sarkar said, "it's easy. If you don't love this job, it's very, very hard." Tony Sneakers doesn't love this job. (That's his old schoolyard name; he'd rather not use his real one.) At 53, he has worked eight years inside the booth. Now his rover's assignment has left him in a deserted station in deep Brooklyn late on a Saturday night. Felonies reported on the subway have lately declined to 3,000-a-year from 19,000 in 1990, but when they happen, it's often at times and places like this. "Tonight, I had a kid pull down his pants in front of me," Tony said. "One of these days..." From the darkened street above came a man's voice shouting, "I want beer!" Tony said: "They get drunk and they want to travel. I'm not supposed to let them in. They curse, throw garbage. I move away quick enough." Four people came in asking directions to Long Island City, in Queens. "Take the Q to Prospect Park for the S to Franklin for the A to Hoyt-Schermerhorn for the G," said Tony in don't-bother-me tones. "Read the map. It's all there." As the four retreated to a map taped to the wall, Tony said, "The job is mindless. I miss my brain." Sometimes rovers go missing altogether. Signs on empty booths say the rovers are in the station when they're nowhere to be seen. Many small exits have also been made over into fully automated entrances, leaving riders to do battle alone with ticket machines and tall turnstiles fondly known as "iron maidens." But the MTA says it has no plans to buck the new norm: As ticket booths vanish in Paris, Washington, London and New York, the Carmine Dargenios of the world are the last clerks standing between commuter and computer. Excerpt: "This job here is what you make it," Mr. Dargenio said at his Rector Street stop; with 14 years' seniority, he rates a post -- not too busy, not too lonely -- where he can fill some gaps in service while subway big shots fret over floods, fare hikes and communications flubs. As trains enter the station, Mr. Dargenio checks his watch and notes the time; it's the only way to gauge when the next train might roll in. Just as one did, a woman digging in her purse couldn't find her ticket; Mr. Dargenio hit a button and let her in. Another woman struggled with a big cardboard box; he opened a gate and let her in, too. "How was your weekend?" he asked, and she said, "So, so." |
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