Sidereal Times

GO Customer Service Ambassador Fails to Bring Solution to Reader-iPod Dispute

Originally Published: August 15, 2018

A Spokesman for Ontario public transit system GO Transit admitted minutes ago that Customer Service Ambassador Keith Wiczniwevwskii has failed to bring peace to coach 2305, the third car on the 5:00 Richmond Hill train.

Relations in the normally peaceful passenger vehicle began to deteriorate around 4:53 PM local time today, when Scott Atkinson, a youth garbed in hip-hop finery, took an upper-level seat beside Dmitri Vaskov, a Royal Bank employee completing his regular workday commute from Toronto’s Union Station to the community of Gormley, north of the city. Mr. Vaskov immediately was disturbed by what he described as “that rap rap noise” emanating from a portable music device being worn by Mr. Atkinson. The device in question is believed to be an iPod Touch, though initial reports claimed it was an iPod Classic.

As the upper level of GO trains are clearly designated as “Quiet zones”, meant for reading, relaxing or quiet reflection, Mr. Vaskov asked Mr. Atkinson to lower the volume on the device. Mr. Atkinson replied that he was wearing earphones and therefore was not in violation of the Quiet Zone code. Mr. Vaskov then stated that the issue wasn’t the equipment, it was the simple fact that he could still hear the music”bleeding” through the headphones.

By approximately 5:04, four minutes after the train had begun chugging northward, it was clear the two parties were not going to reach any agreement, and so it was then that Ambassador Wiczniwevwskii was summoned to mediate.

Mr. Wiczniwevwskii, a 3-year veteran of the GO Transit diplomatic corps, immediately tried to find commonality between the two sides, but as the train approached first station stop Oriole at 5:23, no progress had been made. Wiczniwevwskii had to recess the negotiations at this time to return to his headquarters on Coach 8680 to remind people to “stand clear of the doors”.

By the time negotiations were renewed, civility between the two rivals had deteriorated, Atkinson, who insisted he be addressed by his rap moniker “Bizzy B”, called Vaskov a “privileged Fascist”, and Vaskov responded in kind by calling his adversary “a welfare bum-in-training”. Such was the vitriol that Wiczniwevwskii’s suggestion to move the discussion to concerns that were less impassioned, beginning with the technical issues of earphone leakage, was ignored by both sides.

At last report, the two sides were no closer to a resolution, prompting some observers to draw nervous comparisons to another great failure of transit diplomacy, that being the incident in 2011 when a seemingly manageable disagreement about a specific Grand Funk Railroad lyric ended with three dead, eleven injured and the Georgetown GO station in flames.