If you didn’t know that Monday was opening day of the baseball season or that the Women’s NCAA basketball championships were held in Boston yesterday, you had to look no further than the good old MBTA. Local buses prominently displayed “Go Red Sox” and “Welcome NCAA” was flashing for a couple of days in rotation with “1 - Harvard Square”. It’s fun, it makes me smile, but is it a good use of MBTA communications resources? Shouldn’t they instead display the bus route as to not confuse riders who may not be so familiar with the bus line? I mean, I can just see the confusion in the eyes of a foreign visitor: “Red Sox? I thought I was going to Harvard Square?” or “Wonder where NCAA is? You think it’s a nice part of town?” (insert foreign accent here).
Obviously I’m being silly. I suppose the whole thing adds to the uniqueness of Boston, the one place in the country where maps are useless because there is no way to determine your location based on street signs as they are conspicuously absent, where lawyers in suits wear baseball caps to work convinced that it will make the Red Sox win, where year after year Bostonians get tricked into thinking that spring had sprung and then get hit with snow in April and where the letter “r” was dropped from the alphabet a long time ago.
Ete’nal optimism! Or Pu’gato’y!
hit it wicked fah nomah. Oh no that doesn’t work any more.
I miss the sox caps though! definitely preferable to anything with a yankees logo and I’m not from NY or Boston.