MBTA riders have a field day with incomplete tweet

It appears that the beleaguered MBTA — the morning after a fire caused a frantic evacuation of an Orange Line train on the middle of a bridge, and led one passenger to dive into the Mystic River — has given up.

Or at least that’s the impression one might get from the transit authority’s 6:40 a.m. tweet Friday, which declared, “Red Line experiencing northbound delays of up to 15 minutes due to a …” (Ellipses ours.)

One might imagine the T’s poor, put-upon social media technician just throwing up their hands mid-tweet and promptly exiting stage left, possibly into the Mystic River. But we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it was an errant keystroke and not abject surrender that caused the snafu.

(FWIW, a subsequent tweet several hours later clarified that the cause was “a disabled train approaching Quincy Adams.” Same delay? A new and improved one? Only the transportation gods know for sure.)

Regardless, the incomplete tweet was more than enough to prompt riders to dive into the fray in an effort to complete the sentence themselves. Some were more serious, with references to a “poorly run transit system” and an apparent lack of concern on the part of the T. But most saw that the more appropriate response was to laugh so as not to cry, hence the creative responses below:

The MBTA, for its part, did not delete the original tweet until almost three-and-a-half hours after the initial posting, which would seem to indicate they have a sense of humor.

Peter Chianca

General Assignment Editor

Peter Chianca, Boston.com’s general assignment editor since 2019, is a longtime news editor, columnist, and music writer in the Greater Boston area.

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