Louise and The Men of Transit

New Map

Numbers are good, Louise hummed to herself as she jaunted down her apartment building hallway to her front door. She was impressed with how much thought the TTC CEO and his team had put into coming up with this idea of renaming all the routes to numbers. Her team, the Customer Convenience Team Vision, must've helped that advance in making the TTC more convenient for Torontonians.

She squealed.

She, Louise, was now part of that team.

Louise inserted her key into her front door lock and turned it. The lock opened with a clunk as she surmised how she had to show the men that she was worthy of being part of the Customer Vision team. Louise stepped into her tiny front foyer and dropped her purse into its accustomed worn spot on the wood floor. The giant well-used TTC route map that she had tucked under her left arm stayed in place. Louise's cat Marcia strolled around the corner into the foyer from the short hall, her head uptilted, eyes half-closed in bliss. She spotted the rolled map under Louise's armpit. Marcia halted. Marcia opened her eyes wide, slitted them, then scampered back around the corner on suddenly silent paws.

Trouble.

Louise bent her eyebrows together. But why, she asked herself. She glanced down at the map. Couldn't be that, could it? No, this was a good map. This was going to help her learn the CEO's methods. She'd watched his videos with growing admiration at how he'd latched on to numbers for TTC routes, kind of like how New York named its streets with numbers. Tenth Avenue. Fifty-sixth street. She liked the tidiness of numbers. The CEO had said non-English speakers preferred numerals to English names. Louise had nodded to herself when she'd heard him say that; made sense to her. His TTC research had shown that customers favoured numerals and tourists would find their way around Toronto easier, he'd reiterated in a few videos. Toronto would become a boom destination again because of his rebranding. The TTC itself would become a destination for transit buffs from all around the world for the first time since its heyday in the 1970s.

Louise had puffed out her chest at the thought.

Public transit aficionados were already descending upon Toronto to see what the TTC was doing right, he'd boasted. And numerals were a big part of that train of growing accolades, he'd stated. CEO Barg crowed how proud he was of all the work his team had done and how Torontonians had participated in TTC surveys to show that they were on the right track. Louise had felt so inspired by CEO Barg's enthusiasm and rightness in knowing numbers were the way, that she'd believed she could overcome her poor math skills. It took all of her parents' combined efforts every night to raise her math mark from F to C-. But she'd done it. She'd stayed clear of numbers whenever she could since then, but she could see how she'd been wrong to do that, how numbers were friendly, convenient, better than . . .

Louise stared into her past and worried. She had had her parents back then. She only had Marcia to help her now with these numbers; Marcia had disappeared.

Louise shook herself out of these silly thoughts. She shouldn't be so negative. She'd been a kid then. She was an adult now, with a real job at the TTC. She was one of the team. Andy wouldn't have hired her if he hadn't believed that she could help the men devise better and better convenience ways for the customer. Louise walked forward. She could do this. She had this giant map, and she would memorize those numbers. The CEO and the men in her team were right. Numbers were simple. They made sense. She would memorize them.

On to her compact dining room table, Louise unrolled the giant TTC map that she'd squirrelled out of her private supply room. Did no one else go in there, she wondered, puzzled. Sometimes, she thought someone did because things would appear she thought hadn't been there before. This morning, she'd retrieved a trash can, carried it back to her dim corner, and gathered up her little hill of cloths and wipes. They were now secure in the can, which was tucked in between her chair and the stained wall. She assumed someone came to empty the trash . . . although, thinking about Harold's overflowing can, she did wonder. But no matter. She had found this map while she'd been picking out the cleanest trash can. She'd spotted the long roll standing on end, tucked in between two desks and had suddenly realized it could help her become like her mentor, the CEO. With its frayed edges and yellowed back, it was surprisingly uncrushed and uncreased. She hadn't expected anyone to stop her when she left Head Office with it, but she had decided it was more prudent to retrieve it from her supply room on her way out of the office than to bring it back to her desk with her new trash can while the men were still there. They may've asked questions that she didn't want to answer. She couldn't think what kind of questions, but the feeling hung in her mind.