Poor College Student and Subway Fares

I can never decide if I like paying one price to get anywhere on the New York subway or paying based on distance traveled like in Tokyo. Paying $2 to get as far as JFK is pretty nice in comparison to the ¥1300 ($13.40) it costs to ride for two hours from the Tokyo airport to the city center. On the other hand, paying the price of what could be a full hot dog dinner from gray's papaya is frustrating. This is why Poor College Student must squeeze two people through one subway turnstile to save metrocard swipes.

It's an absolutely gratifying way to travel, paying half price.

One day last year, my friend Ching from Penn is visiting and we're taking the subway downtown. As I walk down the stairs from the street, I spot a few cops hanging out down by the further turnstiles, but think nothing of it. Ching can't find her metrocard so I'm like, don't worry about it, I'll swipe you in. So we squeeze into one turnstile and I swipe my card we go through and Ching's like, what just happened? I'm like don't worry about it.
We walk toward the stairs to the platform and a cop goes "Young lady. Young lady?"

Ever wished you could glance sideways without anyone knowing that you're looking at them? Well, you can't have everything.

So I do the stupid sideways glance that isn't very discreet and sure enough the stupid cop is telling stupid me to come back out of the stupid turnstile. I act as calm and collectedly pissed as I can while inside I'm really like fuckfuckFUCKCKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! They go through the spiel where they make you feel like real dumbass by asking if we realized what we just did was ridiculously retarded or not, in cop language. Then they took down our info. And then they fined us $60. Each.

Poor College Student becomes poorer after paying $60 fine for trying to save a dollar on metrocard swipes.


That's the day I learned that you should really look before you do something that could potentially be really pathetic.