MBTA No Tiene CharlieCards Para Ti

In yesterday's "Starts & Stops" column, Mac Daniel noted two stacks of CharlieCard pamphlets at the State Transportation Building. One was in English, one was in Spanish, and all was right with the world.

Then Daniel noticed something funny. He began opening up the pamphlets, which said they contained CharlieCards, only to find that all the pamphlets in Spanish didn't have any CharlieCards.

Obviously a city employee along the line no habla espanol because the pamphlets clearly state CharlieCards are inside, and a Spanish speaker is going to be mighty disappointed. Of course, said Spanish speaker will probably just grab one from the stack of pamphlets in English, but the whole incident suggests an astonishing laziness on the part of the MBTA.

If it was a manufacturing error, couldn't someone have just taken a roll of Scotch tape or a Glue Stick, sat down, and pasted the cards inside the pamphlets? It's not rocket science. And it's cheap. In fact, right after Daniel called the MBTA to ask about it, the T said, "The security guards had attached cards to every pamphlet in the lobby using either tape or glue."

At least the T was responsive, but shouldn't they have done that in the first place? It's annoying because they probably wouldn't have done anything about the empty pamphlets unless a reporter made a fuss. That kind of "Oh, I'll let someone else deal with it" attitude is part of why Boston ridership is so skeptical of pretty much anything the T does.