T = Smoking?

(Note: this post only applies to those Bostonians who reside on any above-ground T stop on the B, C, D, or E line.)

If you must commute from one part of Boston to another, you ride the T at some point in your day. Unless your more wealthy than a Halliburton shareholder, chances are you'll be swiping your T-Pass like every other junkie, yuppie, and college student that manages to find its way to the Green Line's gilded doors.

On any given day, you'll find yourself waiting for a train. Whether its a means to get to work, to class, to a party, to a game of frisbee on the common, or to a shopping trip on Newbury Street, you'll be waiting for that rusty, electric-powered bus we call a train to barrel down the tracks.

And when I say waiting, I mean waiting. This is the type of waiting you haven't seen since that last trip to Disney World when you tried to get on Space Mountain on a Friday afternoon. This is a Sisyphisian effort. You'll stroll out to the T at 9:30 in order to get to work at 10. Plenty of time, right? Wrong. The T will come at 10, and maybe get you to your destination by 10:45.

In order to compensate for this long waiting time, you decide to make your way to your local T stop at 9 instead of 9:30. That morning, you arrive at 9 but what do you know? The T comes strolling down right away. More excitingly, it gets you to your destination in 15 minutes! But wait, now you're 45 minutes early to work with nothing to do but waste a buck fitty on a cup of iced coffee at dunks.

The T seems to enjoy teasing its riders. Its almost like a 'fuck-you' to the passengers who, everyday, sit their asses on its seats, vandalize its walls, sneeze on its handlebars, and stick gum on its walls. But really, the T does tease. When you need it to come, it waits. When you have time to kill, it comes. When there's an emergency, it disappears. When you're waiting for a B, it'll change its destination to Riverside. It works in whatever way that it needs to make your life as inconvenient as possible.

That being said, I came to this conclusion one morning as I rode on a shoulder-to-shoulder train on my way to a class that I was already 20 minutes late for. If you smoke a pack of cigarettes a day, you'll probably shave ten years off your life. (Note: I have no scientific claim to know whether this is true or not, but for the sake of this rant, just bear with me)If you added up every second, every minute, and every hour that you spent your life, no, wasted your life waiting for the T, it would probably equal the same amount of time that you would lose from smoking a pack a day. Waiting for the T, unlike smoking, shaves time off your life from the inside-out, rather than just chopping it off at the end. The T steals precious minutes from you. These minutes add up to hours. These hours add up to days.

But, I will conclude this post as I will conclude every post on this blog: there's not a damn thing we can do about it.