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Hot Dog Days My San Francisco Chronicles rant tourists Work Diaries

Chaos with the Cable Car

Today, for some reason, the Powell-Mason Cable Car line was not working, so that equaled crappy business for the hot dog cart. As a result as well, I got so many questions from frantic tourists who were wondering “Why or why were the cable cars not running?!” The MUNI Cable Car workers had a small sign up by the waiting area, but it was not noticeable enough. They kept their ticket booth open until 4pm, but that was that.

In many ways, they could have done more. Sure, perhaps these breakdowns happen frequently for them and they feel they do not need to answer tourists when tourists ask “Why is it not running?” But it’d help if they made the news more noticeable/public so people would not be left either standing there stupidly waiting for a nonexistent cable car to arrive or asking the same question over and over and over.

It became irritating near the end of the day; people wanted to know why it was not running, and you know what, I didn’t have the answer to that, and I probably never will since I do not even work with the cable car people. I feel like tourists assume that I gain this sort of information via osmosis, but sadly I have to burst their bubble on that idea.