Outside the shiny headquarters were about 100 CTA employees protesting layoffs by CTA boss Forrest Claypool.
“What do you do with your time,” I am often asked.
In the old days time was money.
Now money is time.
I have been working on the goal of living as well and spending less.
So I will spend time (which I have more of) to save some money (which we have less of).
Take the annual city sticker fee. We still have two cars and the city sticker costs $85.
But seniors only have to pay $30.
Before we were seniors we could pay the fee online and get the stickers in the mail. But it wasn’t clear how to do the senior thing online.
And you only get one senior discount no matter how many cars. Both cars are in my name.
“Add your wife’s name to the title on one of the cars,” a pleasant City Hall voice told me on the phone.
It costs $35 dollars to park in the Loop, so we took the el down to the State of Illinois building to add Anne’s name to the Honda.
“Marriage license?” the clerk said.
Anne had brought all the paperwork. Except who thought we would need our marriage license?
That was two weeks ago.
Today we went downtown again. We would add Anne’s name to the auto registration. We would go over to City Hall and get our reduced fair city stickers. We would go to the CTA and get our senior CTA passes. The passes allow those over 65 to ride for 85 cents instead of two fifty.
This time the name transfer went smooth as butter.
City Hall was another matter entirely.
The line stretched out the door and looped three times around.
It took an hour and 45 minutes.
Furloughs meant that there were only four windows open.
“New software,” the clerk told us when we finally got to the window. “Really slow.”
And with one guy ahead of us in line the computer system went down completely.
“You were lucky,” the clerk said ten minutes later. “It usually goes down for longer.”
The city stickers look pretty straight forward this year. Usually there is a high school art contest and some kid gets their drawing on the sticker. The kid is usually from a Catholic school and the picture is of the Chicago skyline with a rainbow and a Sox or Cubs logo.
I would never allow work like that to get past my art room door.
But last year some stupid people decided the drawing had gang symbols embedded in it and the public school kid got the prize taken away. I think a Catholic school kid came in second and her picture got used.
I could be wrong about the Catholic school thing.
This year the sticker has nothing but the year in black helvetica and a scan code.
“Shall we go home now,” Anne asked?
“Absolutely not,” I said. “We going to finish our tasks. On to the CTA for our senior passes.”
Info on senior passes is on the CTA website. But I challenge anyone to tell me how to do it online. Or if you can do it online.
The CTA customer service office is next to their shiny headquarters on Jefferson in the west Loop.
Outside the shiny headquarters were about 100 CTA employees protesting layoffs by CTA boss Forrest Claypool.
You can’t go anywhere these days in Chicago without running into a protest.
CTU President Karen Lewis was speaking and the crowd was cheering.
You can’t go anywhere in Chicago these days without Karen Lewis speaking at a rally and the crowd cheering.
“I should have guessed you would be here,” Karen said to me.
“We were just getting CTA senior reduced passes,” I shrugged.
“You’re going to cross a picket line?”
Karen frowned.
“Shhh. Don’t tell anyone.”
As it turns out, we didn’t cross a picket line.
The customer service office is down the block. It is a sad little crowded space with few chairs and two customer service windows. The third largest transit system in the country and the customer service office has two customer service windows and no place to sit down.
Has Forrest Claypool ever stepped foot in this shitty, filthy room?
Most of the people were poor, handicapped, foreign language speakers or seniors.
Not exactly Rahm’s base.
If Claypool ever did step foot in it then he would have stepped in a puddle of Dunkin Donuts coffee that sat in the middle of the waiting room floor. As everyone else did.
I explained to a Polish lady who spoke no English that she needed a number. I did this by pointing and doing charades. I could only imagine what was going to happen when she went to the window to try to explain what she needed.
The guy ahead of us didn’t have five dollars to get a replacement pass for the one he had lost.
“Take the form home and send us a check,” the CTA lady told him
I just don’t think this guy has checks.
An hour later we were on the el going home.
This adventure took us six hours.
But I’m retired now.
I’ve got the time.
Fred Klonsky 
How absolutely true this is. Now just add the problems your bank has caused and try to get something done there. My last venture involved three trips to the main bank in the Loop and three to my neighborhood branch, plus numerous phone calls to both and to another state. It took six weeks to get the money they took in error. The local people would solve the problem and tell me what would happen and when and a week later some higher-up, would decide it wasn’t going to happen and send me a letter and I would have to start all over. Of course no one knew why the letter had been sent. Even though they took $50 a yr. for four years, in error from my account, they told me their policy is only to refund the current year. I told them it is like a robber taking their TV one year, their waller another, the next year their microwave and the last year their iPod, and when caught telling them his policy is to return only what he stole the current year.
Then when I had my mortgage payment taken out of my checking account (at the same bank), they took it out four days earlier than scheduled and claimed I was overdrawn. They called the morrgage dept. in another state and they totally denied takning it, even though is was the exact amount. My branch said it was taken even though the other office said it wasn’t. My account was frozen for six days and I was penalizxed with over $150 in “insufficient funds”. They finally realized I wasn’t overdrawn and had $800 in the account. They “forgave” me the overdraft fees. How generous.
I’m pissed just reading this!