My MTA Technology Odyssey

So I'm standing out there in popsicle stick mode waiting for an MTA bus this morning, and the bus is late, and I'm thumbing through the tweet stream and I come across this:

Ok, I think, maybe the routes are adjusted. So I hit the link there in that tweet, and I get a

that looks like this:

Obviously, telling someone accessing this using a smartphone standing at a bus stop that they can find out how routes are affected by picking up brochures at Music City Central is beyond inane, but there is also a link you can see there, allegedly enabling us to "view it online" if we look "under the media tab." So I hit the link, which gives me the MTA home page, no mobile site, not optimized for reading on a smartphone-like device, and let's see here, looking at the navigation tabs across the top ... no "media" tab!

But wait! Over on the right under the navigation tab bar there is a "current news" box...

So I hit the "Read more" link ... and what happens? My smartphone starts downloading a PDF (yeah, that's the ticket ... essential transit information as a PDF) ... but ok, my device can download and read PDFs, so I wait for the download, then open it ... and ... it's a

of the same content to which the original tweet sent me:

Now if I were to click on the link in the media advisory I would end up replaying the sequence, cycling through a nightmarish technological whirlpool ... but fortunately right about then the bus comes — no change in my route, just a late bus.

Earth to MTA: whoever is doing your online interface with riders has a promising future over at healthcare.gov.