At work way too early after feeling certain I’d be down to the wire. I took the old route, the N to the 4 or 5 express, which I should have timed but I think it’s at least 10 minutes faster than the R. The advantage of the R is that it’s a no-transfer thing and it leaves me right at an elevator to the passage that connects the Oculus to Fulton Center. That elevator is basically always available. With today’s route there is a lot of stairs (Is or are? Hmm, “stairs” could be considered a collective singular, right?) and access to the elevator is unpredictable. The R suffers from being a longer walk, though making a transfer from the N has been relatively painless. Was in no mood for it today, though. Sitting naked in the shower, ablutions performed and seed wasted, it just seemed later than it really was. I shaved, too, which always seems like it will chew up more time than it ever even can.
At the 36th Avenue station I found that the MTA has and likely will continue to allow bad information to mar its digital map of the area. The Fasher-Landau Center For Art, despite its owner pronouncing she would be there “forever”, closed in 2019, nothing to do with Covid, and the place sat empty for years until a school moved in about a year or so ago. Having been gone for over 5 years you’d think the MTA’s digital map would reflect this absence but there it is, potentially confusing tourists and locals alike and wasting their time should they venture out toward this museum they saw on the MTA map but had never heard of. I’ve badgered the MTA about this several times to no avail. It’s not lost on me that it’s an infinitesimally trivial matter in the bigger picture. But it’s troublesome to me that physical paper displays were replaced with power-hungry digital screens and there seems to be no efficiency or benefit to this transition. You can’t even make a simple change like this when it should be easy. I mean it’s supposed to be easy.
That’s part of the bill of goods they sell you when they say advertising screens should go digital but I will never understand the mentality. You see a screen with something that interests you or that you need to know. By the time you even understand what you are looking at it disappears, only to be seen again if you have the time to stand and wait an unspecified and indeterminate length of time for it to reappear. I guess the logic behind this interface being valuable is that rotating the paid advertising screens creates infinitely more inventory compared to a static display ad. But nothing has proven this postulate.