<img src="https://thisisdrivel.com/blog/2012/images/nycchristopher.jpg" align="left" width="300" B jumped a subway turnstile yesterday! Can you get a more authentic New York experience than that? And it only happened because we weren’t paying attention.

We had to catch the train at the Christopher Street station and went down the wrong set of stairs, ending up on the platform for the train that was headed uptown instead of downtown, so we had to leave the platform, climb up the stairs, cross the street and go back down the other set of stairs to the platform where the downtown train would meet us, if our Metro cards had let us in when we got there. They didn’t. Apparently, if you swipe your card at any given station, it won’t work there again, at least not for while. We don’t know how long, exactly, because there was no attendant to ask, and no matter how thoroughly we searched the station, we couldn’t find a helpful sign or informational poster to tell us.

So we did what any reasonable people would do in our situation: We uselessly swiped our Metro cards a couple dozen times each, getting the same stupid error message over and over again, until finally I caved and bought a couple of one-way tickets from the machine, handed one to B, swiped mine in the turnstile and stepped through. Once on the platform I turned to say something to B, only to discover she wasn’t there. Given our luck up to that point, I can hardly say I was surprised. Turned out she was still back on the other side of the turnstile, swiping her card.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” I said.

“It says, ‘See attendant,’” she told me, reading the error message.

There was, as I have already noted, no attendant at the station, so I told her, “Screw it! Jump the turnstile!”

That didn’t go over very well with her. “There are cameras everywhere!” she protested. “I’ll get in trouble!”

“How will you get in trouble?” I asked. “We paid for the ticket. Jump the damned thing.”

She wasn’t quite up to jumping it – we’re not twenty years old any more – so she ducked under the bar and joined me on the platform, nervously glancing over her shoulder at every person who walked past us. When we got off at the next station she was sure there would be a transit cop waiting for her, which would have been the perfect ending to this story, but there wasn’t. She got away scott-free.