Morning wait for The Ride.  Julia takes The Ride to her day center.  The Ride is our MTA van transportation for people with disabilities.  We are lucky to have something like it. Sometimes lucky; sometimes a curse. 

The Ride is safe, the drivers are helpful, the interface be it on computer or the phone are relatively effective.  The flaw in the scheme is reliability.  The Ride is notoriously unreliable.  So much so that Julia new day center does not allow clients to use The Ride to and from the center.

And I understand.

The Ride comes early, the Ride comes late, and sometimes it doesn’t come at all. A few times, The Ride has come to the wrong address and left, blaming Julia for not being available. Occasionally, they have used Lyft to pick Julia up from her day center and the Lyft driver has no idea that Julia will not be waiting outside for the Lyft car. 

Using The Ride for the past 15 months, I’ve come to understand how and when to communicate with the dispatchers.  If I find out that a Lyft vehicle will be used, I call and ask that the driver be given specific instructions. No one likes doing this. When The Ride fails to show up and I call the dispatcher for an immediate re-schedule, I refuse to be transferred to a department where I can lodge a complaint.  I don’t want to complain, I want the ride.

Both Julia and I have engaged in the practice of frustration and patience. 

Today, Julia was supposed to be at her day center by 9. The Ride scheduled itself for 7:30 which is brutal because neither of us like waking up early and getting to her day center more than an hour early puts her in a holding room with nothing to do. Still, we get up early.  Julia took her shower, had breakfast and was ready by the door at 7:30. The Ride’s scheduled time comes with a window of 30 minutes.  A few minutes before 8:00 (the end of the grace period) I called the dispatcher and was told that Julia would be picked up by 8:10.  I called at 8:30 and the dispatcher said there were delays but the van would be here soon.  

There have been days like this when I call back a second time and get told that her ride was cancelled by the driver or that they can schedule something else for her.  Both without a reason.  

And no fault of The Ride, but it never fails that these times when The Ride is very late are always, always, the days that I want to get out of the house early. Today, I missed the possibility of leaving before 8 to get to Cheshire’s house to spend the day with the boys.  

It is now almost 9, and my third call to The Ride has yeilded a new reason that there is no service.  The drivers’ tablets are down, not working at all. This has been the case all morning, the dispatcher tells me.  Drivers had no way of knowing where to go.  They haven’t had any way of knowing where to go all morning.  And so, the last two calls telling me that the van was late and would come in another 10 or 20 minutes were not true. I want to but don’t scream—what good could it do to scream at the dispatcher.  Granted, they lied, knowingly or unknowingly.

And so, I am crabby right now.  No Ride, no plans, the morning in shambles. Of course, it could indeed be a lot worse.

And now, we regroup for the day.