Louise and The Men of Transit

Customer Vision

"Thank you, Marvyn," Louise smiled broadly at her hairdresser. The hours she'd spent in the chair was worth it. She had her brown curls back. Richer brown than her own; curls bouncing over her forehead, down over her left ear, while her hair waved over her right ear, not quite long enough to curl properly. Louise pinned her new nametag on her soft yellow cardigan. "Louise" was inscribed across a prominent TTC logo. No one could miss it. She was going to ride the rails and gather her own customer feedback of people using the service in real time. Marvyn's eyes like glowing coals smiled down on Louise. Their lightly-pinked lips curved up softly,  "I'm glad to see you back."

Louise rejoiced, "I'm glad, too. Oh Marvyn, I feel so free."

"I bet, without that bag," Marvyn kidded her, tapping her shoulder lightly.

Louise felt naked without her bulging purse but had sensed that its hulk would dissuade people from talking to her. Her wallet and keys fit into her navy pants' capacious pockets easily. Louise inhaled, her happy eyes half-closing, and exhaled slowly, lifting her eyelids to beam at Marvyn.

Marvyn returned her smile and walked her to the cash desk. Louise followed in her comfortable lace-ups; she'd kicked the loafers into her hall closet next to the patent leather shoes and shut the door. She went to unzip her purse and laughed, "My wallet is in my pocket!" She fished it out and counted out the bills.

Marvyn put the cash away.

Louise's laughter rang like bells heralding the sun in the cold winter. She slipped her wallet back into her right-hand pocket, checked her left-hand pants' pocket to ensure her smartphone was still there, pulled down the hem of her V-neck cardigan over her navy pants, and asked Marvyn, "My shirt look okay?"

"Yes, it does, Louise." They leaned forward to adjust the left point of her white shirt's collar to rest straight down over her cardigan to match the other point. "There."

"Thank you, Marvyn."

"Be good, sweetheart."

"I will," Louise called back over her shoulder as she jaunted out the door and cantered south on Yonge to Wellesley station. She was going to get on the subway and find customers. She would ask if she could help them and, through helping, hear what they really thought, make them feel like they were talking to a friend, not feel like they must say what they thought the TTC wanted to hear.

She joined the high school students siphoning through the automatic sliding glass doors of Wellesley station and was soon standing on a train, her eyes bright, her smile inviting, her straight small stature disarming.

"Excuse me, can you tell me if this train goes to Sheppard?"

"Certainly," Louise said. She discreetly slid her smartphone out of her pocket with her left hand as she pointed to the map over the doors with her right hand. She had the Notes app ready so that when she turned her phone on, she could immediately take notes. "Here we are," Louise pointed up to the last of the nifty little red lights denoting stations that the train had passed through before the stream of green lights, which represented the stations the train was heading to. She fake squinted and observed, "It's a little hard to read, I have to admit. But Sheppard is up there."

"Yes," decried the woman. "I have my reading glasses, but they don't seem to help."

Louise confided with a smile, "You probably need distance glasses."

The woman nodded, her face relaxing into a grin, "Yes. Maybe I do. Except I don't have distance glasses. I find these maps so hard to read. The lights are cool looking, but I can't read the station names."

"No worries. I'll do it for you," Louise said. Louise balanced herself against the curved pole edging the glass panel next to the seats and stretched her arm way up, pointing towards the top of the map near the ceiling of the train. "That's Sheppard," she said and read out the intervening stations. After she'd guided the woman,  the woman turned away and Louise quickly thumbed a note into her app about the labels being too small to read on the map.