FMT

5/19/2009

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    It’s the name of my new website: FMT – F*** My Transportation.
    I didn’t always hate transportation so much. But in the span of one weekend in Cape Cod, I became what I like to call a true transportater-hater.

    It all started out when my mom and I decided to take a simple bus ride from Boston out to the Cape. It seemed easy enough – before I headed home from college for the summer we were going to take the bus and visit some family friends on Cape Cod.  But, oh, were we wrong. The little lights above our heads soon lit up when we realized what we were in for.

    Our transportation problems didn’t start when we got to South Station. They started on the sidewalks right outside of Emerson College, where our trip began. One of our suitcases – which we previously thought was annoying just because of its excessive weight – had a broken wheel. We had paid to fix this wheel a few years ago, but didn’t realize that it was still broken when we packed it full of our travel necessities. Mom was too impatient to wait for a cab (“I’m not stopping!”), despite my attempts, so we continued to struggle down the uneven sidewalks of Tremont Street. Soon enough, we regretted that decision, as we became more and more frustrated with the wheel that wouldn’t budge, no matter how hard we pushed. My mother was screaming obscenities at me, and I was trying to laugh at the ridiculous situation (and try not to tell her “I told you so”).

    After many more screams of pain and anger, and after a man on the street asked us if we needed any help (probably out of fear that my mom was about to abuse me…!), we finally reached the bus station. My mom sat down to relax while I went off in search of purchasing tickets. After waiting for ten minutes for the ancient woman at the desk to halt her conversation, I bought two tickets to the Cape – but the lady informed me that the bus left in 15 minutes.

    I sprinted back to my mother, and then we stopped quickly at Au Bon Pain for some food (packing up my dorm all day hadn’t exactly left us any time to eat) before rushing to the bus terminal. Our “rushing,” however, was quite unsuccessful, as the wheel of the suitcase-of-doom still refused to move one bit. Halfway to the terminal, the wheel caught on a crack in the sidewalk, and the suitcase fell forward, my food flying ahead. Luckily nothing spilled, but it did make my heart beat a little faster.
    Even worse, upon reaching the entrance to the bus terminals, we saw that we had to make it up two escalators before we got to the bus. This may sound much less daunting than it did to us at the time – and for good reason. On the first escalator, it was my turn to push the stubborn suitcase. When my escalator ride was over, I tried to push the suitcase off onto flat ground. But the wheel wouldn’t budge. So the suitcase toppled over, I tripped over the suitcase, and my mother, behind me, fell over me. My laptop went flying and smacked to the ground. Thud. (Side note: my laptop, luckily, still works). The worst part about our top-of-the-escalator-incident was that once we had regained our composure, we looked over to the security man in charge of the area, and he was just standing there. Not looking at us. Just standing, twirling his leg around in the air. We were frustrated, obviously, and quickly found the elevator up to the next level (we weren’t about to attempt another escalator ride…!).
    Eventually we made it to the bus terminal… And our bus had made it there too. But the bus had already left… Without us. That was a disappointment. But we quickly regained our composure, and mom went off to exchange our tickets.    We were determined not to miss our second train, which we had to wait another hour for.
    I sat across the terminal from our gate (where I could reach a wall outlet), and my mom sat right by the gate to make sure the bus didn’t get away from us. She went to the bathroom 5 minutes before the bus was supposed to arrive, so that she would appropriately time her return to the gate. However, as she returned from the bathroom, and after I had gotten all of my stuff together and began to head toward the gate, we saw the bus begin to pull away. I didn’t even know it had arrived yet! The clock had just barely turned 9:45. The bus was supposed to “begin boarding” (according to the older-than-dirt woman who sold us our tickets) at 9:45. Apparently that information was false, because we had just successfully missed our second bus of the day. We were officially idiots.    Now that we felt sufficiently moronic, we were off to a hotel for the night to try again – finally with success – in the morning.    After our bout of bad luck at South Station, the rest of our trip was pretty free of transportation issues. However, we did have some unlucky stretches - our hotel room was the absolute farthest possible room from the elevators, and our flight home left from the farthest gate at the airport back to Seattle. And every taxi we got into all weekend was driven by rude old men.        Maybe it’s just the East Coast?

 

Hi everyone!

Thanks so much for checking out my website! I will continue to update the site with any new videos I have or updates to my reel and resume!

I am hoping to get my radio reel together soon, and add more video to my tv reel once I get all of the tapes together.
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-- Cassidy Quinn

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    Cassidy Quinn Brettler
    Emerson College
    Acting and Broadcast Journalism
    Alpha Epsilon Phi
    Class of 2011

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