Commentary about this e-mail sent to me by the MBTA is below. Keep reading…
MBTA Reference # 02720524
March 17, 2011
Dear Dickie Richards,
Thank you for contacting the MBTA. We appreciate your business and value your feedback.
We appreciate you taking the time to write and sincerely apologize for the Operator’s dangerous actions while driving Bus Route 60.
With the information you provided, the Operator was identified, interviewed, and reinstructed on safe driving. Any further infractions may result in more severe disciplinary action. The MBTA has a progressive disciplinary policy, up to and including termination.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.
Should you have additional questions or concerns regarding this issue, please contact the MBTA’s Customer Communications Department at 617-222-3200 or 800-392-6100, Monday through Friday, 6:30 AM to 8:00 PM and Saturday and Sunday from 7:30 AM to 6:00 PM or visit our website at www.mbta.com.
Thank you again.
Sincerely,
Flora
Customer Communications Department
This email/electronic message, including any attached files, is being sent by the MBTA. It is solely intended for the recipient(s) and may contain information that is proprietary, confidential, legally privileged, and/or exempt from disclosure pursuant to state and federal law. If you have received this message in error or are not the intended recipient(s), please notify the sender immediately by reply, and delete all copies of this email/electronic message and any attached files from your computer. If you are the intended recipient(s), you may use the information contained in this email/electronic message and any attached files only as authorized by the MBTA. Any unauthorized use, dissemination, or disclosure of this email/electronic message and/or its attached files is strictly prohibited.
Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.
This was sent a month and a half after I reported the incident. Here is my bitching and moaning about their not responding to me the first time.
First of all, there is a serious grammatical error in the MBTA’s response. The MBTA says:
We appreciate you taking the time to write
This is wrong because you need to use possessive pronouns in front of gerunds. So it should be:
We appreciate your taking the time to write
You could argue that President Obama makes this very same error, so what’s the big deal? Obama’s job is to bomb babies and children in Asia and Africa, take away people’s subsidized heating oil, fuck federal employees, and raise the taxes of the poor while keeping taxation of the rich unsustainably low. Obama should know proper English to set a good example, but, as an executive officer, he is really not in the field of customer service.
Because the MBTA failed to provide me with any evidence that they reprimanded this individual, there is absolutely no reason to believe that they actually did. I think that what I am receiving from them is a load of sugar-coated crap, but even if they did reprimand this individual, it would not have done anything to correct the undesired behavior. The driver does not remember what happened a month and a half ago. In order for punishment to be effective, it must be unambiguously and immediately paired with the undesired behavior. You learn this in any introductory psychology course in behaviorism. We’ve known this fact for about 70 years. It is not revolutionary or earth-shaking.
Furthermore, the MBTA completely failed to address my demand for the videotape of the incident. This is not a private bus company; this is a public bus company being paid for by your state and federal tax dollars. Any videotape that was made of the incident should be public domain. I have a right to it, and I would’ve put it on YouTube had they met my demand, so that the entire world could see the psychotic assholes at work on the MBTA. You have a right to see this! It’s your tax dollars at work on your public property!
They left me no e-mail address to respond to. What I think is funny is all the legal mumbo-jumbo at the bottom of their correspondence. I love how they say:
Any unauthorized use, dissemination, or disclosure of this email/electronic message and/or its attached files is strictly prohibited.
They are a public agency. By definition, any record that they create should be freely made available to anyone. What they sent me is PUBLIC DOMAIN -- it is not their fucking intellectual property. What the MBTA doesn’t understand is that this is not North Korea. We, supposedly, live in a free and open democracy, where the public has a right to know what its government is paying for.
All I can say is that the MBTA sucks elongated and discharging gonad.
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