The pigeons in downtown Port Huron have a new piece of sculpture to check out.
Blue Water Transit recently installed a piece of art that pays tribute to William Pitt Edison, Tom's brother, who founded the first public transit system in Port Huron.
No, this isn't the #5 that runs from downtown to Birchwood Mall and back. That bus is pulled by gray horses.
It looks pretty cool, even by our cynical standards.
But meanwhile, inside the terminal . . .
The Blogger went inside the other day, and asked the young man behind the customer service window if he could call in a pickup request for the next day. The Blogger's Obamaphone told him "no network available," and the nearest public phone was four blocks away, at the city building, in the MichiganWorks resource room.
The exchange went something like this:
Blogger: Can you call in a pickup for tomorrow morning?
Young Man: No, we don't do that.
Blogger: Yes you do, I've done it here before, I don't have any phone signal, and I'm NOT walking to MichiganWorks and burning a half hour, there's a line of people waiting to use the phone there, and they need it for way more important things than I do.
Young Man (I hear the wheels turning): Well . . . if you step out of line and let me take care of -
Blogger: NO, I'm NOT getting out of line, I waited and now it's my turn, you're just trying to either get rid of me or make an example of me, and it isn't going to work . . .
Young Man (reaches for a notepad and a pen): Okay . . . show me your ID -
Blogger: I'm NOT showing you my ID, you DON'T need to show ID to ride the bus -
Young Man: I need your home address, from your ID -
Blogger: I don't get picked up at my home address, your drivers won't pick me up there because it's at the end of a dead-end street and they can't (actually, they refuse to) turn around there. If I show you my ID, will they come get me at the address on it?
Young Man passes the notepad and a pen through the opening in the bulletproof glass and instructs me to write down where I want to get picked up, where I'm going, the date, and time. I do. He turns to his computer and tappety-taps.
Young Man: "You're all set."
Blogger: "(location), tomorrow morning, 10:45 to 11:30, correct?"
Young Man: "Correct."
This burned three minutes. If the YM had done what I asked him to do in the first place, it would have taken 30 seconds, he wouldn't have made an enemy, and he wouldn't have provided more material for this blog which started as a first-person account of dealing with St. Clair County's useless public charities but has turned into the I Hate Blue Water Transit blog.
Jesus fucking Christ.
This is how Rosa Parks must have felt while trying to get from Point A to Point B on the bus in Montgomery and sit wherever she wanted. She should have felt grateful. At least they let her ride, no questions asked.
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