Advanced Reader Copies — free books sent by publishers so that booksellers can be familiar with the product — are possibly the greatest benefit of working at the Bookstore. I mean, besides my awesome coworkers, and chances to meet minor celebrities like Joe the Plumber.
There are two kinds of ARCs: the first and most common, are oversized “quality paperbacks” with a boring cover and a sales pitch on the back. The texts are usually in pretty lousy shape, missing the occasional punctuation mark. These are usually sent well in advance — for example, my ARC of Christopher Buckley’s “The Supreme Courtship” came last May or June, when the book itself wasn’t published until September.
The second ARC is exactly similar to the actual published book. Essentially, the publisher just sends an extra copy.
What happens to the ARCs is always the same: our inventory guys saunter into the back room, announce, “New reader copies!” and dump them in a pile. Employees shift through them. A lot of them are crap — pulp books designed for the non-discerning reader.
Every now and then, there are gems. I’m particularly thrilled I scored a copy of Buckley’s “Supreme Courtship”, I missed “The Lost City of Z” by five minutes, but was dancing up and down for David Benioff’s “City of Thieves.” I picked up the ARC for James Butcher’s new Dresden file book, which inspired me to actually start reading the series, which bummed me out because the first two are just dreadful (although I think that had as much to do with Butcher’s shoddy prose as the actual plot, however, I did read enough into “Turn Coat” to know that his writing has improved tremendously).
When I moved to DC, a friend gave me some sound advice: “Public transit is all good and well, but you’re going to have to get used to waiting.”
The waiting can be inconvenient, I admit, but I’ll still maintain I’d rather wait for a bus or a train, and have the freedom to read while en route to my destination, than to be stuck behind the wheel of a car navigating downtown traffic while looking for an open parking space.
If I have a point, it’s this: I love the Metro. I love the dirty trains and the weeds growing along the rails at the Woodley Park Station. I’m not such a fan of the urine-soaked bum on the L2 last night, or the occasional train derailment, but what would I face if I drove? Traffic jams? Traffic accidents? If a train derails at Bethesda, I can always walk.
The big “Metro News” this week is that the Washington Examiner published the results of a “secret shopper” assessment of the Metro system. In a sidebar, the Examiner notes that, oh my holy fucking god, people file an average of 100 complaints with the Metro system per day.
100 complaints? Is that all?
Let me tell you something: according to Wikipedia, Metro rail cars have between 64 to 81 seats per car. When you factor in standing room, that means that on an average day, Metro’s total complaints are less than the full capacity of one car on one train. Now, even with six lines, and eighty-something stations, I have no idea how many trains Metro runs total during the working week, but I guarantee you, it’s probably a lot. I mean, heck, if you consider that at rush hour there’s usually a train every three minutes, in each direction, and transit time from Shady Grove to Glenmont is about an hour, that’s forty-trains total on the Red Line. Figure that as an average, that’s 200 trains on the entire system (with a 20-train reduction on shared-track lines), each train being between six and eight cars, which means you’re looking at — conservatively — over twelve hundred individual rail cars, ferrying over 350,000 people, making 700,000 trips per weekday.
100 complaints?
If anything, only 100 complaints is indicative that most people have no problem with Metro. Or, if they do, they consider it a worthy trade off to not have to negotiate traffic and look for a parking space.
What struck me as most serious about the report was the customer service results. Look, any service industry — the Bookstore, a restaurant, a transit system — customer service is the be all and do all. There’s no excuse, whatsoever, for poor customer service, or rudeness. I think we all understand that new employees are going to get a lot of their training “on the floor” (so to speak), but one would hope that Metro would make this a priority.
I also don’t get complaints about buses being off-schedule. Maybe it’s just that I spent far longer than I care to admit schlepping pizzas about. It seems to me bus delays are the most expected things in the world: these aren’t the Knight Bus from Harry Potter that could go warp six and slide through traffic jams as if they didn’t exist. I mean, for fuck’s sake, that bus I was on back in January — are you telling me it was the driver’s fault that a car passenger opened her door as the bus was already passing, requiring the bus to be taken out of service?
No, no, no.
Lastly: I think we all know that Metro is an old system. There are going to be problems with it. It would have been nice if it had been designed with dual-tracks in each direction so that single tracking wouldn’t be a necessity and maintenance would be easier. But, truthfully? I’m far happier with the Metro than I would be without it.
