So… it was a weird month for the TTC.

Off the bat I should point out that this piece slanders just about everyone involved in any recent TTC-related news, as well as a certain faction of TTC riders, and also the Toronto Star.

The moral of this story: everybody sucks.

Full disclosure: I suck too.

I see you eyeing that ‘Back’ button. I know: some jackass on the Internet has an opinion about something. Hoo-Ray. Just hear me out, OK?

OK.

So, in chronological order, let’s start off with the first in the long string of unfortunate incidents: the McCowan station ticket collector debacle. Alright, yeah, so our friend Mr. George Robitaille probably shouldn’t have been a-snoozin’ at his post; however, this was hardly worthy of the absolute rage and indignation it sparked across the city.

To quote Torontoist on the matter: “This news story wasn't just about one sleeping collector, as much as numerous commentators who wanted to pretend that falling asleep on the job never, ever happens in the private sector, and that in the private sector you get fired the moment you do anything that doesn't profit your employer directly… No, this story was really about people expressing their rage at the TTC for sucking in all the little ways that the TTC sucks to their minds, some of which are of course unjustified or simply silly, and others completely reasonable (not that a lot of those showed up on the internet).”

Like I said, Robitaille is one of the aforementioned people who suck. He clearly doesn’t care too much about his job and isn’t justified in his action at all; however I do have a number of problems with this whole situation:

First of all, and this is just me nitpicking, but Jason Wieler, the guy who snapped the shot seen round the world, posted his masterpiece on his Twitter with the following caption: "Yup, love how my TTC dollars R being spent..."

I’m not a Twitter user, but he easily had characters to spare to finish his “are”. Frankly, people who are too lazy to spell three-letter words fully aren’t aloud to have valid opinions about their fellow citizen’s lack of industriousness.

Wieler, in an interview with Torontoist as part of a different article had this to say: "I didn't want to get the dude in trouble...that wasn't my intent of course; I know that this guy's probably got a mortgage and kids. No one wants to take away someone else's work. But on the flip side, I'm still rubbed a bit the wrong way when it comes to the fare hike and I thought we got a raw deal on that. It's a fine line: you don't want to get the guy in trouble—that wasn't my intent originally to do that."

Which brings me to my next point: one thing that really rubs me is when people (on the internet or otherwise) explicitly refer to themselves (when referring to public employees) as “Your boss.” Like the first Torontoist article suggests, people are using this scandal as an excuse to get all huffy and entitled. I find it highly offensive that some people are under the impression that public employees – whose salaries are largely drawn from tax dollars – somehow owe them something personally. That because a small, miniscule fraction of your tax dollars went to form a small, miniscule amount of this bus driver’s salary, this gives him the responsibility (despite any x-factors, like, say, I don’t know, traffic) to have a perfectly timed bus with plenty of available seats, and you the right to chew him out if he doesn’t.

I’ve talked to a lot of people who are under the impression that all transit operators are surly and rude. I think this is ludicrous. For one thing, I’ve encountered way more rudeness and indignation from pissed-off passengers who take a late or full bus as a personal slight against them, as opposed to a relative few rude operators. For another, I’m sure the only reason that there are sassy operators is because they have to spend all day dealing with people who treat them like the help.

Anyone who has worked in the service industry can attest that the majority of people that you encounter in such an occupation are a swarming mob of hateful, impatient drones that are brimming with spite and hopped up on a combination of caffeine and radiation from their Blackberries. I’ve had plenty of jobs in the service industry, and the one thing you learn, and you don’t often learn much, is that most people aren't nice. The natural reflex is to throw the malice back. So yes, Robitaille fell asleep on the job and some whiny, resentful citizen of the universe thought it prudent to tell the world about his beef.

The guy fell asleep, it’s not like he was taking handjobs from people who were short a quarter on their fare. As though ninety-nine per cent of angry commenters haven’t ever fallen asleep at work, or at the very least sent a clandestine text message or surfed Facebook when they shouldn’t have been. As though, because Robitaille is a public employee, it changes the whole face of fucking around at work. Let’s be honest, the amount of people who are fucking around at work greatly outweighs those who aren’t. You’re not the only one who thinks your job is boring, just count yourself lucky that you aren’t being watched by every citizen’s avenger with a camera.

But, just when everyone thought that it was all going to blow over, some other jackass took that video of the TTC operator taking a liberal break at a coffee shop. OK, so maybe he didn’t need to take as long a break as he did, but he’s – and I can’t stress this enough – a human being with a tough job and a long night ahead of him. The man deserves a break, he’s a bus driver not your chauffeur. Furthermore, you have no right filming him without permission even if you do think of him as your “employee.”

So now we’ve got a bunch of would-be vigilantes with cell-phones running around the city snapping justice photos. True, the TTC isn’t what it possibly could be, and there are a lot of TTC employees that aren’t that great (as though any large company is made of entirely reliable and vigilant employees), but it is neither the right nor the responsibility of riders to police public employees. They’ve got supervisors like everyone else who are more than capable of dealing with these sorts of problems. One hopes.

Then there was Adam. Seriously, what the hell happened here? From total rock star to dumbass-of-the-year in just ten days. Baffling. I was at least eighty percent sure I was going to vote for Giambrone, but now I’m glad he’s pulled out of the mayor’s race; the man is spineless. Honestly, some stupid little girl with revenge in her eyes gives the Star an exclusive interview and the guy just packs it in without a fight. Pitiful.

A politician’s personal life should in no way determine their performance in office. That’s it. So he got himself some inappropriate tail: surely not something that the woman Giambrone lives with should or would want to deal with, but ultimately something that shouldn’t factor into whether or not I want to vote for him. It’s his life and he’s got to do what he’s got to do – shit happens. It’s the fact that he merely apologized and quit that makes him not worth voting for.

Adam, you were a young guy, with a brave, exciting vision and at least the façade of knowing what you’re talking about – you might have been a good mayor, had you any balls. Why didn’t you tell those vultures at the Star to go fuck themselves because that idiot you were sleeping with has nothing to do with  the campaign? Why didn’t you tell your opponents, such as that perfidious elfin neophyte Rocco Rossi, to stick to the issues and keep talking when their teenage girlfriends give scandalous stories to an even less reputable paper? Alas, you proved them all correct when you bowed out with a pathetic whimper: you aren’t a rock star, you’re another spineless politician with a taste for undergraduate ass.

That said, Kristen Lucas, the woman in question here, is no prize herself. Blabbing to the Star because she didn’t get her way – Giambrone rejects her, so she, being the worldly woman that she is, decides her only choice is to ruin his career. Awful. Though, once again, this can easily be construed as another poor choice on Giambrone’s part who probably should have known better – that getting involved with immature young girls when you are a politician almost certainly leads to calamity. Poor move, Adam; probably should have dealt with someone who isn't a fresh out of high school drama queen. And then there’s the Toronto Star, which has clearly lowered itself to Sun-level proportions of spectacular tabloid journalism.

Shortly after the McCowan incident, I made a journey out to the windy eastern limit of the subway, a purgatory where I’ve never been. McCowan really is a useless little blight on the otherwise mediocre face of the SRT. Proof of the TTC’s flawed nature – but let’s again be honest here, name a Transit System that isn’t cracked – McCowan has no reason to exist.

No buses go to McCowan – even the McCowan bus terminates at Scarborough Town Center, as does every other route that passes by the lonely station that doesn’t even have a bus stop for buses to not stop at. The RT ride from Scarborough Town Center to McCowan takes about thirty seconds if there’s no train on McCowan’s one operational platform. If there is a train on McCowan’s one operational platform, you will be stuck in a bottleneck between the stations for longer than it takes to walk the very short distance from one station to the other. In fact, McCowan is literally across the street from Scarborough Town Center. There’s nothing in the direct vicinity of McCowan station except for the Mall parking lot, a Price Chopper and a couple of condo buildings, so there is no reason to go there unless you shop at that Price Chopper or live in one of the condos. If you are going to Scarborough Town Center Mall, you’re better off at its namesake station which connects directly.

I counted fourteen people getting off the train with me when I went to stake out this dark corner of Scarborough. In the fifteen minutes in which I waited in the station’s concourse, I was able – due to the fact that McCowan has only one entrance and no connecting buses – to count exactly how many people were coming in and out of the station. Three trains came after mine: the first contained twelve people, the second contained six people and the third contained twenty people. Nineteen people boarded a train in fifteen minutes. This sampling was taken at rush hour on a Monday. The Robitaille incident took place late on a Saturday night. No wonder he fell asleep. Wieler was probably the first person to have passed through there in an hour.

The point is, in this month of scandal and debacle, there is no clear cut right or wrong. Everybody is right and wrong in some way or another, but they’re all to busy slandering and appeasing to look at the issues. We are a city of over two and a half million people, we are all facing a very important election in the fall, and we are all concerned about our infrastructure and our transit. We are a city, a community and we cannot let ourselves get bogged down with such trivial things: we must take the good with the bad and recognize that everyone has a part in making a city a good place to be.

TTC, sometimes your employees are kind of not great, and you haven’t always made the best choices in designing efficient ways of moving Torontonians, but as a public office it’s inevitable that you are going to take some heavy flak that you may not necessarily deserve, because we've all got to blame someone. I still think your heart is in the right place and you’re not out to screw me.

George, get your head in the game, buddy; I know taking tickets at the 66^th least busy TTC station (of 69) on a Saturday night is boring, but it’s still your job. That said, you didn’t deserve all of the publicity you got and were made a scapegoat when it really could have been anybody.

Jason, you really should have kept your mouth (and by "mouth," I mean camera) shut. You should know better: the internet is a harsh mistress and no place for photos of sleeping strangers. Also, learn how to spell. However, you didn't know that this would blow up as it did, and you have a right to be disgruntled and a right to be concerned.

TTC riders, you need to learn that if you want TTC operators to be nice to you, you’ve got to be nice to them. They aren’t your personal chauffeurs, and they're people too. It's called "public transit" for a reason. Though it’s true that there are a lot of things that could be better with the system, and we all need to be able to express our opinion. However, you should keep in mind that the customer is not always right.

Kristen, you’re a pretty serious bitch, and while you may have exacted your revenge, you still made a total ass of yourself in the process. Adam’s career may be more or less fucked, but you certainly don’t come off sympathetically at all -  you’ve merely exposed yourself as the child you are. But you are very young and were apparently given a false impression. The “what was I thinking?” moment you’ll have in a couple of years will be more than enough punishment.

Toronto Star, if you had any taste, you'd send that misguided fool of a girl home on a rail, and for that you made yourself no better than any other rag when some of us were under the impression that you were a half-respectable publication. But, it's a tough business, and these days especially, as a newspaper you have to really grab people to make them interested. I understand that it maybe will have been a good decision in the long run, but you still should probably have left this one for the Sun.

Adam, I have no sympathy for you at all.