TTC, Yonge and Bloor Station, 9am. People everywhere. Busy. But the goof in the booth doesn’t have a line up which is surprising for a Monday morning and I step forward to purchase a weekly pass. I look into the glass booth to see my ticket collector with his finger wedged up his nose. This was no Seinfeldian “scratch”, no this was an unmistaken, prolonged dig into his nasal cavity with his pinky. How refined.
I am sure my face flashed utter disgust. “Uh. Can I get a weekly pass…?” I ask. His tool hand reaches over and grabs a stack of cards. My eyes are fixed at his pinky as my stomach flips. His pinky never touched the cards but I still burped out “Could you… uh… wipe your hand first?”
Apparently I’ve just asked him to do some insurmountable task because his face flashes pure annoyance. I’m tempted to spit on his protective glass and say we’re even.
This is the new TTC, people! They have to protect their image!
6 thoughts on “Going for Gold, Digging Deep”
Well the more revolting the behaviour the less likely someone is actually going to want to break in and stick ’em up – or whatever today’s slango is.
The behaviour I witness from TTC employees–particularly those in fare booths–never ceases to amaze me.
I could write an entire blog dedicated to the filthy transactions I see out in public. Hell, I was thinking of making a puke puddle flikr thread for a while. Was it you who mentioned a while back that we are our own worst enemies with over-cleaning and over-sanitizing? I seem to remember you telling me that we weaken our immune systems with all these new anti-bacterial products on the market.
yes, that’s a prevalent theory in disease circles: the more microbes we kill off, the stronger the rest get. killing off the beneficial or relatively benign microbes just opens the door for the truly vile ones, a healthy percentage of which deal with our little poisonings in a remarkably tolerant manner. there is even a good amount of evidence that many of our parasites which we perceive as entirely negative are actually quite necessary to our function, and integral to the workings of our immune systems.
aside from that, i think most of those cleansers which trumpet a silly ‘antibacterial’ quality are at best doing absolutely nothing. yes, it’s a good idea to wash your hands regularly, but to obsess over sterile conditions (which is almost certainly impossible outside of an utter absence of all matter) and dose ourselves with antibiotics every time we have a dripping orifice actually contributes to our own ill health. one of the surveys i evaluated at work a couple of weeks ago had a tie-in to a study of intestinal parasites (loosely grouped as ‘worms’) which pretty much read as a worm cheerleading manual.
not that i mind, i’m all for human extinction.
Now Now… Lets put things in order.
Think about body parts that your tongue has been up and what body parts have been in your mouth…. a finger up the nose doesn’t sound so bad.
(giggle)
oh relax, it could have been much worse. as it is, you should be washing your hands (and all other relevant body parts) every time you exchange anything with another human being. we’re dirty, disgusting, filthy things with no sense and even less desire to acquire any.