Attack of the Dragon on the 38-Geary

Two demon thingies
Photo by Flicker user Maramusine

I get it, San Francisco is a town full of geeks. Moscone plays hosts to Wonder-Con or Comic-Con or some type of Geek-Con. As we do with all walks of life, San Francisco welcomes the Geeks. So I wasn’t surprised to be riding the 38-Geary and overhear a teenage boy on his cell phone talking about wizards and dragons. It seemed pretty normal actually, until a minute later when his conversation took a turn for the worse.

My ears perked up when he said, “Well, you know, at first when he said he was from another planet I thought he was a gamer, I mean dragons and war lords from other planets are pretty rare, you know.”

(Writer’s note: “Pretty rare?” I think they’re up there with the unicorns my grandma thinks are real, but I digress.)

From what I could gather from his phone conversation, some really scary dragon and alien war lord have arrived in San Francisco and contacted our young friend on the Internet and now want to kill his whole family. It’s unclear why they chose this random kid to have a battle with but my guess is because he’s telling a bus full of people all their alien secrets. With my luck, the dragon will attack the 38 bus while I’m on it.

Confused Riders on the Outbound J

i took the J church TO start everything off, but it doesn't really count
Photo by Flickr user dennis

This hilarious-yet-sad anecdote came to the Muni Diaries inbox last week from Muni rider Eric G:

I got on the J at 34th and Judah. For those not in the know, the N sometimes goes outbound to Ocean Beach, then becomes an outbound J. This means it turns onto Church St instead of going into the tunnel.

Of course, this confuses a lot of people. One woman asked me if it would go to Civic Center. “Nope,” I replied.

A few minutes later, a second woman asked if the whole train was going into the tunnel, or just the first half. “This train will turn at the next stop,” I explained.

Thing is, this woman wasn’t just a regular Muni rider. She was a fare inspector. And to make matters worse, she was leading a group of fare inspectors.

I don’t blame her for not knowing. But I think this is symptomatic of Muni not training their employees nearly well enough.

Have you ever been confused about the direction your train was going? Send us all your Muni stories today!

Weekend Photo Diary: They didn’t see me

theydidntseeme
Photo by tangobaby from the Muni Photos Flickr pool

Amazing photo by tangobaby that I don’t really want to ruin with words. So I won’t.

Instead, I’ll recap a pretty busy week here on Muni Diaries. I’ll start with the post that kicked the week off for us: the July post of the month. Honors this month go to Plug1’s photo post: The Proof-of-Payment game. Later Monday, we posted a report of the M crashing into a car over the weekend, a story that was quickly eclipsed later that day in the now-famous SUV sandwich with F trains for bread. Later in the week, for whatever reason, old news about MTA’s purchasing an insurance policy came to the fore, and our weeks-old question was answered.

Also on Monday, we published the first of two posts by our favorite Muni mom, Beth W. One was about a cool new feature on txtmuni, an SMS service for bus predictions. The other was our first Muni poem, a villanelle.

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