Tonight, after we finished dinner at the Salem Taco Bell, we pulled out of the shopping plaza parking lot as usual, in the right hand turn lane. We merged onto Highland Avenue, which at that point is a four-lane divided highway, and traveled in the right-hand lane. Just a few hundred feet later, a black sedan pulled out of a driveway to the right, and swerved right into our path. Here are five scenarios as to what might have happened next:

What Really Happened
I hit the brakes, bringing our car to a stop and allowing the sedan to safely merge onto the road.

The Correct Boston Driver Scenario
I swerved quickly into the left-hand lane to avoid the sedan. I did not use my turn signal, and I did not check behind me to see if any traffic was coming up in the left-hand lane. I narrowly avoided disaster, missing the car coming behind me in the left lane by inches. He honked his horn. I honked my horn. The guy in the black sedan honked his horn too. Some guy a few blocks away heard it and started honking his horn.

The James Bond Scenario
I flipped a toggle switch on my dashboard, deploying both the port and starboard missles hidden underneath my car. I then pressed a button on my steering wheel to fire both of the missiles directly at the sedan. The sedan exploded in a ball of fire, and I hit the accelerator to zoom right through it. I then pulled a 180-degree turn, deployed the machine guns, and gunned down all of the cars behind me – just for good measure. Also, my car was a brand-new BMW roadster.

The Future World Scenario
I pulled up on the yoke of my flying car, skimming quickly over the other car, wishing that my car really could made that cool, zippy sound that The Jetsons had me hoping for.

The Absolutely Crazy, Never Going To Happen, Not In A Million Years, Fantasy Scenario
The situation was avoided entirely because the driver of the black sedan actually stopped, looked at the road, realized a car was coming, and decided not to pull out into traffic!

Another Boston Globe ***article|http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2004/11/09/charlie_to_begin_new_ride_with_modern_fare_system/*** on the ***MBTA|http://www.mbta.com/***’s new CharlieCard notes:

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Some riders, particularly the young, had no clue about Charlie.

”I thought maybe it had something to do with the Charles River,” said Kara Kitner of Boston, emerging from a Green Line trolley. When the reference was explained, she predicted, ”People won’t know.”

Ted Holmes of Newton agreed. ”Ask anyone under 30: Charlie just isn’t going to mean anything,” he said. ”It was almost 60 years ago.”

…

MBTA General Manager Michael Mulhern said the T’s marketing experts warned that Charlie might not be recognized.

”It did come up when we were weighing the pros and cons of the different names, but we wanted a card with a strong connection to Boston, Boston’s history, and at same time weave in some MBTA history, and the song does that,” Mulhern said. ”It transcends generations. And now we have a fictional character all our own, that is uniquely Boston’s, that other transit systems don’t have.”

…

As for some younger T riders not getting the Charlie reference, [interviewee Coco] Delgado said, ”Get the Dropkick Murphys to record a version of it, and you’re golden.”

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Out of a brief survey of the two people available at the moment (my wife and me), both respondents were familiar with the song “Charlie on the MTA.” Both of us are under 30. Becky is familiar with the song because, she says, “I had probably heard it on the oldies station.” I, on the other hand, am familiar with the song because one of my computer science professors at ***Gordon|http://www.gordon.edu/*** told us about it to illustrate a point.

I guess this just means that other young folk will have to become more in touch with their cultural heritage. What a shame!

***Boston.com reports|http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2004/11/08/mbta_unveils_new_fare_card/*** that the ***MBTA|http://www.mbta.com/***, the oldest public transit system in the United States, is finally ditching its token system and switching over to a passcard system. The system will be called the “CharlieCard”, in reference to the 1940’s Boston political song, ***Charlie on the MTA|http://web.mit.edu/jdreed/www/t/charlie.html***. The song concerns a man named Charlie, who paid ten cents to get on the T, but didn’t have the change to pay the five cent exit fare – a hot political issue at the time. Charlie’s fate is left up in the air, or down in the ground, so to speak – he just keeps riding along on the MTA.

I’m looking forward to the new system. It will be nice to be able to load fares onto a card, and keep that handy, as opposed to needing to buy tokens and have them jingling around in your pocket while traveling. Even better would be if I could use my debit card at a machine to add value to the CharlieCard, as I rarely carry cash. But I don’t know if they have any plans for that. As an aside, our laundromat switched from a quarters system to a smart-card system a while back, and it’s been great just having to slide that card into the washers and driers to do a load or two or three. You even get bonus credits if you add $5 or more at a time.

As for tokens: You might want to buy a stash of tokens before it’s too late – they could be collectors items some day!

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