‘Train traffic ahead of us’ used to be the standard excuse. This week’s frontrunner, ‘a customer needed assistance that has since concluded,’ is currently sitting at a solid four out of five stars.
NEW YORK – Subway commuters across the city have reportedly begun informally ranking MTA delay announcements the way one might rate restaurants, with a small but dedicated online community now cataloguing and scoring the increasingly creative, occasionally borderline poetic language transit officials deploy to explain why trains have stopped moving for reasons nobody in the actual train car can verify.
“‘Train traffic ahead of us’ is the classic, the reliable standard, maybe a solid three stars,” said commuter and self-appointed delay-announcement critic Priya Shah, who maintains a running list on her phone. “But this week I heard ‘a customer needed assistance that has since concluded’ and I nearly applauded. It tells you nothing. It resolves nothing. And yet there is something almost elegant about how completely it avoids any actual information. Four stars, easily.”
The informal ranking system has reportedly gained enough traction that several commuters now actively look forward to delays purely for the announcement quality, a phenomenon transit workers, speaking anonymously, say they are broadly aware of and, in at least a few documented cases, actively encourage among themselves as an unofficial creative outlet during otherwise repetitive shifts.
“We do talk to each other about the good ones,” admitted one conductor, who declined to be named citing MTA media policy. “There is a real skill to it. You want something that sounds official, sounds like it explains something, but does not actually commit you to any specific timeline or cause. ‘Signal problems’ is entry level. The real professionals get creative.”
Shah’s ranking list, shared with several thousand followers across social media, currently places “we are being held momentarily by the train dispatcher” at a middling two stars for being “technically informative but emotionally hollow,” while a recent, still-unverified sighting of the phrase “the previous train is experiencing a situation” sits provisionally at the top of her all-time leaderboard, pending what she calls “further confirmed sightings to verify the excellence was not a one-time fluke.”
The MTA, asked for official comment on the informal ranking phenomenon, issued a statement noting only that “service announcements are intended to provide riders with the most accurate and timely information available,” a response Shah immediately added to her list, rating it “two stars, competent but entirely too straightforward for my taste.”
Shah’s growing online following has begun submitting their own regional entries, with commuters from other cities contributing comparable transit announcement rankings from their own local systems, a development Shah says has turned her original personal project into something closer to “an accidental, informal international survey of how creatively public transit agencies avoid actually explaining what is happening.”
The conductor who first prompted Shah’s attention to the phenomenon says he has, since learning of her ranking system, begun putting slightly more deliberate thought into his own announcements, describing the shift as “genuinely a bit of pride creeping in, now that I know someone out there is actually rating the work.” He declined to say whether any specific upcoming announcements were being planned with the ranking system in mind, though he did allow, with a slight smile, that “a little competitive spirit never hurt anyone.”
Shah says she has no plans to stop the project anytime soon, noting the sheer volume of raw material the system continues generating on a near-daily basis. “As long as trains keep getting delayed for reasons nobody actually explains properly,” she said, “I will keep ranking exactly how creatively they choose not to explain it.”
This reporter, riding the same line the following morning, can confirm hearing a genuinely new entry mid-commute: “we are delayed due to a train ahead of us experiencing delays,” a recursive, almost philosophical announcement that, when relayed to Shah later that day, earned an immediate, enthusiastic five-star rating and a promise to add it to her list “at the very top, honestly, this might be the one that finally wins the whole thing.”
Shah has since renamed that particular entry “The Ouroboros,” a title she says reflects both the announcement’s genuinely circular logic and her own growing sense that the entire ranking project may simply never run out of new, ever more inventive material to actually rank.
She has, for now, no plans to retire the list, and says she considers it, only half-jokingly, “a small act of public service, documenting for posterity exactly how creatively this city continues explaining, without ever quite explaining, why the train has once again simply stopped.”
This reporter asked, finally, whether Shah had any hope the MTA might eventually just start explaining delays plainly and directly. She considered the question seriously for a moment before shaking her head. “Honestly, no,” she said. “And I am not sure I would even want that anymore. Some of these announcements are genuinely the most creative writing happening in this entire city right now.”
She has already begun drafting an end-of-year retrospective ranking her top ten announcements across the whole calendar year, a project she describes, with genuine enthusiasm, as “basically the Oscars, except for excuses, and considerably more competitive than anyone outside this specific corner of the internet would ever expect.”
For related commentary on bureaucratic language accidentally becoming genuine folk art, see News Satire Websites and What Is Satire?, along with further analysis at Satire Website.
Further reading at What Is Satire?. More satire at The Beaverton.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/