Safety is the Top Priority, Unless it can Wait

Sometimes, you get a little peek into the Teflon Death Star. Sometimes it's horrifying, and sometimes, it just makes you chuckle and shake your head.

You may nave noticed some Metro employees are sporting new safety vests--the ones pictured above. Most of the workers I talked to hate the old vests and claimed the sleeves were potential safety concerns, so most of them looked forward to the new vest, which are also supposed to be safer all around.

On Dec. 6 of last year, Metro announced in a memo that all employees, except for the police, would be outfitted with the new vests and that on March 2, it would be the only acceptable vest.

However, just a few days before the deadline--Feb. 29 to be exact--Metro sent out another memo extending the deadline to July 1.

Why?

They ran out of vests.

Here's the language from the memo:

"Due to the increasing number of requests from employees for the new vests, the initial supply of Class 2 vests has been depleted."

Kind of makes it sounds like it was the employees' fault.

Said one source: "They either don't know how many employees they have or someone didn't bother to figure it out."

Even worse? The employee said people who never access the tracks were the first to get the new vests.

Another employee laughed and said "This is typical Metro. If they can't get this right, think about all the other things like replacement parts for the tracks, trains and, escalators, you name it. They do the same thing with those. There seems to be no inventory management at all. There's always way too much of one thing or not nearly enough of another."

The source speculated that it probably would have been cheaper to order the right amount of vests the first time around.

There's nothing Metro can't delay.

Other items:
Metro's transparency doesn't include disruption reports (GGW)
Bald eagle euthanized (WaPo)
Could be worse, could be Detroit (Huff)
It's time to love the bus (Salon)