The MTA Writes Late Passes For People When Trains Are Delayed
Good news if you're ever actually delayed — and terrible news if "late trains" are your go-to excuse — the MTA writes late passes for employees to give to their bosses when train service is disrupted.
They've given out more than 250,000 notes in the last three years, sending forms to bosses at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the NYPD, schools, and apparently actresses on auditions.
The notes look something like this:
“There was a disruption in service, specifically signal trouble, sick customer, brakes in emergency and track circuit failure, which caused massive service delays, reroutes and/or trains to be discharged on the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, A, B, C, D, F, J, L, M, N, Q and R lines,” one recent response read, in part. “As a result, any one delay lasted up to 82 minutes.”
They seem rife for taking advantage of, however. The Times notes one IT engineer requested a letter when he was an hour late to work and received a response saying that 16 subway lines had been affected that day. “As a result any one delay lasted up to 395 minutes,” the letter said.
“I could have gone to see a really long movie and had lunch if I’d known I was going to be excused for that long,” the engineer said.
