Spatch is willing to accept that trains break down and fires break out. What he can't deal with is the way the MBTA wanted to force people to sit in overheated trains for more than an hour during Friday's Red Line meltdown:

Frankly I find it absolutely deplorable that the T ignored its stuck passengers to the point where the passengers felt like they had to evacuate the trains themselves. That is terrible customer service -- hell, it's not even service at all -- and staying in the trains could have posed a serious health problem if someone had panicked, or if someone had passed out, or otherwise required serious medical attention while stranded on the tracks, especially in the Kendall tunnel if there was no cellphone reception or any way to call for help.

So the next time Danny Boy Graubaskas pipes in on the station intercoms with his pre-recorded "it's your job to keep us safe from the terrists" announcement and begins his inane speech with the useless platitude "Safety is our number one concern at the T", if you hear someone in the station loudly coughing "BULLSHIT!" that person will probably be me. Because it's clearly obvious that's not the case. I wholeheartedly encourage you to join in on the coughing whenever you hear that.

Apparently not.

By most accounts, he did as good a job at the Registry as he isn't doing at the T. Josh Ourisman reports on how things have fallen apart since Grabauskas left the RMV:

... We got there pretty early, maybe 10 am, so there weren't that many people in front of us. We waited for about an hour until there were only two people ahead of us in line. Finally we were going to be finished with the damned RMV and have all that needless, inefficient bureaucracy behind us! Then, mere minutes before Jessi's number was to be called, and mine right after, an RMV employee appeared in a flash of smoke and brimstone to inform us that 'Social Security [was] down' and so they couldn't process any new licenses or license conversions. ...

And this was their second failed attempt to transfer their out-of-state licenses to Massachusetts ones.

Long, long lines waiting for customer service. Wasn't fixing that at the Registry one of Dan Grabauskas's crowning achievements? Any chance he'll ever get around to replicating that on the T?

Also, Mr. G., as long as we have your attention, Lewis Forman has some issues, both in general and with the Blue Line in particular.

David reports on the mood at his commuter-rail stop around 8:30 this morning - when some people had been there since before 8, thanks to a train that just never showed:

... Man (to a friend on the platform, as a commuter rail train blows by us): "Yeah, that's about the third train I've seen go by without stopping, so I'm not holding out much hope for the next one."

Second Man (to a friend on the platform): "Grabauskas, man. I want to find that guy and kill him." ...

Read the transcript of Dan Grabauskas's chat on boston.com today. Then head over to BadTransit to see the 14 questions he didn't answer.

T General Manager Dan Grabauskas will be doing a live online "chat" on boston.com starting at 1 p.m. tomorrow (i.e., Thursdy, Oct. 12).

Via Bad Transit, which has a whole series of pointed, yet eminently polite, questions you could pose to Dan, including:

... Do you use your own transit system to and from work and other important appointments? If not, why not? If so, do you excuse yourself often for being late again?

What can "random" searches really accomplish except deflect potential perpetrators to sites that are not being monitored? ...

daniel.grabauskas@state.ma.us

I am taking MBTA GM Dan Grabauskas’s advice to heart. I am using blogspace to vent about the T’s inefficiency.

I can state unequivocally that I have never seen any service improvement due to my participation in the T’s “immensely popular” (with Mr. Grabauskas) Write to the Top program. I write to the top and get the same form letter each time.

Since many of us whole heartedly agree with Mike Mennonno’s Herald quote “You just don’t get very much reaction” with Write to the Top, perhaps it’s time we write to the very top?