DAN'S PAPERS, July 3, 2009 Page 87 www.danshamptons.com
(!-04/. "!93
By Dan Rattiner Week of July 3 - July 10, 2009 Riders this week: 24,812 Rider miles this week: 142,210 DOWN IN THE TUBE Paris Hilton is back in town, but hasn’t used the subway yet. NEW RECORD This past week, the average number of miles per ride ridden by subway riders fell to a new low. Why are riders taking shorter trips? We don’t know. Perhaps they have fewer places to go? Or perhaps they don’t like the subway as much but have to use it anyway? Does something smell funny on the subway, that is getting them in and out fast? Maybe with less money in their pockets they are just taking shorter trips. None of this makes sense. Meanwhile, the riders are mum.
received all of it back so there was nothing further to be sent. A puzzlemaster was brought in and confirmed that indeed, much to the chagrin of the kidnapper, we expect, he had accidentally returned the entire suggestion box to us. The box is now back on the wall, all reassembled from the 15 wooden pieces sent to us, and after experimenting with different ways to attach it to the wall so it could not once again be removed, we have discovered
that heavy bolts were strong, welding was stronger, but the strongest was Crazy Glue. And so there it is, once again ready to receive your ideas, thoughts, complaints and just whatever wacko ideas that might come into your mind. Marco Abianti, a flagman at the Southampton Station who was a woodworker back in Italy where he came from, has done an excellent job in rebuilding the box. (continued on page 93)
THE SUGGESTION BOX IS BACK! Regular readers of this column will recall that three months ago the Hampton Subway Suggestion Box was stolen from its spot on the wall by the turnstiles on our Hampton Bays platform. Subsequently, we received a note demanding a ransom to get it back, which we refused. Two weeks later, we received a piece of the box in the mail from the kidnapper. He said he would send an additional piece of the box every week until we relented and paid the $50,000 he was demanding. After that, more and more pieces continued to come every week in the mail. It was an agonizing decision not to pay the ransom during this period because we knew how much it hurt the suggestion box, but we held fast. Two weeks ago, the pieces stopped. And then somebody got the idea that perhaps we had
1143615
DELAY A 50-minute delay took place between 4 and 5 p.m. on Saturday when one of the pushers on the Southampton platform accidentally pushed the other pusher onto the train just as the doors were closing. The Subway pushers, for those not familiar with them, are the strong-armed employees who have been on the job since Memorial Day to push the crowds onto the trains to fill them to capacity in a timely manner. Southampton, our busiest station, requires two pushers this time of year and when Bob Allen, from Shirley, pushed Bill Havermeyer, from Bay Shore, onto the train it made the platform one short until Havermeyer was able to go around an entire circuit of the system to return to Southampton nearly an hour later, thus the delays. The event happened by accident, according to Allen. He wasn’t mad or anything. He just didn’t see Havermeyer’s padding and boxing gloves and mistook him for a passenger.