(Photo: The CTA wants to know what you’re thinking…that is, if you can figure out what they’re asking.)

The following is cross-posted on my Huffington Post Chicago byline.

This week, the Chicago Transit Authority is surveying riders on the front page of its website. As you might expect (especially in the still-turbulent wake of Ron Huberman’s exit), the agency is doing a rotten job of it.

Especially for a transit provider with a historically bad relationship with its riders, customer surveys should be brief, friendly, well crafted, and easy to understand. The CTA’s current survey is none of those things.

Instead, it is full of industry jargon (how many of you take “CTA Rail” to work?), double-barreled questions, and closed-minded assumptions about its own ridership. And if you work in a number of fields including communications, the very first question tells you they’re not going to trust your answers–no matter how regular a CTA rider you are.

This unfortunate survey is obviously a rush job. CTA just lost $35 million from its budget by dint of an RTA vote last Thursday and needs to figure out how to prioritize the money that’s left and lobby for aid in the future. You’d think the agency would have been attending to both issues already. The haphazard nature of this survey says otherwise.

Maybe CTA President Richard Rodriguez should spend less time driving to work and more time attending to the system that 1.5 million riders a day depend on to get around Chicago. In the Sun-Times article linked above, he says he does it to spend more time with his kids. Hands up other captive CTA riders reading this who’d like to have the same option? How dare the head of any transit agency drive to work in his own city?

Here’s the comment I submitted to the CTA near the end of the survey, when they finally asked my opinion. Of course, I work in communications, so who knows if they’ll ever get around to reading it.

“I cannot believe how badly written and edited this survey was. It was obviously a rush job, and if it wasn’t, then it’s even more of an embarrassment you took time on it and it still resulted in such a wooden, wordy, badly written document.

You have jargon dropped in all through it. You ask riders to rate ‘Your CTA Rail’? Our CTA Rail what? You mean our local L line? The L line we use most regularly? Do you honestly think your riders use the same jargon your internal planners do?

In the question asking why riders use CTA, you were so closed-minded you didn’t even include the potential answer, ‘Because I prefer to.’ I do. I don’t drive. Don’t know how. Have never paid a gas tax in my life. I am the kind of rider who should be your biggest advocate.

Congratulations on creating a customer-aimed document so badly realized that all I intend to do now is show it to my friends as yet another example of how clueless the CTA is internally. Your lack of commitment to your own agency seriously makes me want to learn how to drive.”

Though I’d probably never follow through on that last part, I meant every (other) word. Rodriguez, if you don’t mind, get out of your car and attend to our transit system, please.

And hire a new survey writer while you’re at it.

Related posts:

1. Snowy CTA Night with Coalition for the Homeless
2. Transit Riders Still Second-Class in Second City
3. CTA to Eject Rush-Hour Riders?

(Graphic: Do you have a blog the Windy City should know about?)

I’ve covered some interesting items in the past few weeks on Chicagosphere, my blog about Windy City blogs on the Tribune’s ChicagoNow online network. The network is still in beta, but the community is thriving and I’d love you to come be a part of it.

Here’s a look at the bloggers and issues I’ve featured on Chicagosphere in the past two weeks. If you have a favorite site you think more people should know about it, pitch me at: mikedoyleblogger (at) gmail (dot) com.

The Beachwood Reporter: Conquering the ‘Net One Niche at a Time
Blogmeister Steve Rhodes is out to prove that opinionated niche news sells newspapers. At least virtual ones. His Beachwood Reporter is a juicy smirk-fest of local proportions. But if this web visionary told you his next killer strategy, you might end up sleeping with the fishes.

Jeff Ramone’s Supersensibly Perceptive Gay Ten Commandments
A sardonic gay Chicagoan with no love lost for the status quo puts out a call to arms for the LGBTQ community to know where it came–and where it stands today–if there’s ever going to be hope to achieve true equality.

Don’t [Blank] Around with The Daily Blank
A new news-satire blog shouts its way onto the local scene–but are they making guinea pigs out of their audience?

How to Be a Healthy “Hottie” with ChronicBabe.com
Chronic pain suffer Jenni Prokopy shows young women how to deal with ongoing health issues and still let the “Babe” within shine.

Scotty’s Got an Awesome Blog
Scotty Iseri wanted, got, lost, and is again on the hunt for an office job. His video blog chronicling all that is one of the funniest you’ll ever see.

Bloggers Respond to Chicago Media Future Conference
I review the reactions of my media peers to June 2009’s Chicago Media Future Conference, which I also attended. For a conference with “Chicago” and “future” in the title, I found myself straining to hear much mention of either one.

Finally, if you like what you’ve read on my Chicagosphere byline, please consider subscribing there as well. And thanks for checking it out!

• Subscribe to Chicagosphere via RSS: 
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Related posts:

1. Lately on Chicagosphere: Media Skills, Mayoral Thrills, Urban Ills
2. Introducing My New ChicagoNow Byline: CHICAGOSPHERE!
3. Oinklings from My First Week Writing Chicagosphere

(Video: Four reasons why for once I had a good time at the Taste.)

I admit it, for the first time in the six-and-a-half years that I’ve been a Chicagoan I had a good time at the Taste of Chicago. Not that I don’t love shuffling at one mile an hour in direct 90-degree sunlight, eating over a trash can, running from wasps, and peeing in a porta-potty…

Actually (as I wrote in July 2007) who does? These are the primary reasons most locals I know swear as the vendor tents come down on July 5th that they’ll never go back to the culinary sweat-fest. Yet come the following summer we always return, like hungry lemmings with long-term memory loss.

This year, it was the CKFTies (Cool Kids from Twitter) who dragged me along, led by Diva Filipina, and joined by my neighbor, Mattcountant. We entered Columbus Drive at Monroe. The initial stretch of the festival south to Jackson was as always: croweded; slow; and pushy.

And then culinary angels unexpectedly smiled. Or da mare’s special event planners, more likely. Because the rest of Columbus right down to the ferris wheel was a dream. Gone is the layout of previous years with a double row of food vendors down the middle of the street leaving narrow, punishingly crowded pedestrian areas on either side.

Instead, this year’s vendor tents are placed on either side of Columbus adjacent to the sidewalks–creating a single, wide, and comfortably roomy walking area in between. It didn’t take away the sun, wasps, or lack of sit-down eating areas. But it did make for a relatively jostle-free, well-moving crowd that left no one in our group yearning to leave early (the past hallmark of any group visit to the Taste.)

The pleasantness of the promenading almost made the higher ticket prices more palatable too. Thanks to the New Depression, a “Taste” portion can run as high as five tickets this year, with many full servings demanding nine or more.

Still, it was remarkable to enjoy the Taste for once instead of merely feeling like I was surviving it. With or without the company of friends who made it extra-special this year, I may go back. Not for nothing, but three words, folks: Original Rainbow Cone.

Now there’s eight tickets with my name on them.

(Click the HQ button for a higher-quality video. RSS subscribers, click here to view the video on CHICAGO CARLESS.)

Related posts:

1. “Taste” Tested
2. The Taste for Old Times’ Sake
3. Pride and Piquedness

(Photo: Who are these people I write about, anyway? Tai Chi in Nob Hill’s Huntington Park, on my April 2006 visit to San Francisco.)

It had to happen sometime. I’ve finally created a comprehensive list of the friends, colleagues, dates, and various miscreants I’ve featured here in the virtual pages of CHICAGO CARLESS for the past four years.

By now, the dramatis personae are numerous, and even some who appear regularly on this blog have had trouble keeping track of the backstory. So to help out readers–and, er, subjects–old and new, I’ve put together an A-to-Z guide to this blog’s ongoing Cast of Characters, with a synopsis for each and a link to a Google search that will pull up every CHICAGO CARLESS post where they appear.

If I’ve left anyone out, let me know. If you’d like to be left out, you probably should have remembered those three magic words my loved ones have come to rely on over the past few years…“Off the record.”

Click through for the CAST OF CHARACTERS.

Related posts:

1. Introducing My New ChicagoNow Byline: CHICAGOSPHERE!
2. Happy Birthday to Me: Four Years of CHICAGO CARLESS
3. New Media Study Ranks CHICAGO CARLESS Top-20 Community Website

(Video: Was last winter’s minus-17 really that bad?)

I rarely engage with other Chicagoans in the city’s seemingly official pasttime of grousing about winter weather. But when it’s 90 in the shade, my plaintive side takes a more public turn. No matter how cold the spring, we always face Divine retribution come late June. This city bakes from Gay Pride through the Taste of Chicago. Why? I think it’s in the Bible. Watch the video and I’ll tell you why…

(Click the HQ button for a higher-quality video. RSS subscribers, click here to view the video on CHICAGO CARLESS.)

Related posts:

1. Envy Thy Neighbor
2. Why I Like the Chicago ‘L’
3. The Circle of Life

(Photo: Sixteen lanyards of chocolate-flavored condoms make for a colorful lay lei.)

When Pastry Chef Chris gave Hoosierella the 18 extra chocolate-flavored condoms in May at our weekly Lido’s Caffé coffee klatsch in Oak Park, no one expected them to come back.

“Actually, there’s 16 of them now,” said Hoosierella last Tuesday, with a sheepish grin. “I figured I’d keep two for me and the hubby to find out whether there’s truth in advertising.”

A month ago, ‘Rella shared among our core coffee threesome her burning desire to find an unusual gag gift for a family wedding. “I just want something they’re going to remember,” she said.

The response from Chris pegged the conversational tenor of our weekly meetups perfectly. “You know, I do have a couple dozen extra chocolate-flavored condoms on rainbow-beaded lanyards out in my trunk.”

Scooby-huh?

To our surprise, Chris overcame our collective look of befuddlement with an actually plausible answer. “They’re leftover from an LGBT fundraiser I staffed for a health clinic at the Crowne Plaza during Bear Pride.”

‘Rella didn’t miss a beat in responding. “I’m in!” she exclaimed. “They’re perfect! I can throw them outside the church instead of rice!”

Last week, though, her tone was far more flaccid. “I couldn’t do it, I just chickened out,” she said. “Although several relatives emailed me thank-yous for not going through with it.”

It’s amazing how foolish a person can feel upon returning a fistful of unused chocolate condoms in a group setting.

“Don’t worry,” said Gay O.J., re-joining our group for the first time in weeks. “We’ve all felt like that.”

I sensed a story coming. Remembering O.J.’s last tale of driving to Wisconsin to cure a license suspension there and then fleeing the local fuzz once spotted behind the wheel (his nickname is what it is for a reason, the month-long felony lockup should happen before summer’s out), I almost pulled out a note pad.

“This year I ran into a guy online who I met in France a decade ago,” he continued. “I was renting house in Paris and met a local who asked me to meet him later at a club on a street I thought I knew. So I went and waited, but he never showed up. Everyone there looked at me like I didn’t belong, and it didn’t make sense until the naked guy walked up from the basement.”

Conversational tenor, your table is ready.

Gay O.J. went on. “So I asked the doorman and it turned out I was in a sex club next door to where I was supposed to be.”

“So was he next door?” asked Chris.

“Oh yeah, we had sex,” said O.J., matter-of-factly. “And that was that until I ran into him online. He was coming to Chicago and I asked if he wanted to get together. He said yes.”

Honestly, none of us saw it coming.

“When he got off the Metra, I told him it was nice to see him again, and he looked at me all puzzled and said, ‘What are you talking about? I’ve never met you before in my life.’”

And…?

“Oh yeah,” said O.J. “We had sex.”

I looked at Chris. “I’d ask you if you had a sex story but I already know you don’t have anything recent to tell.”

“Not after what you put me through,” he snarled.

“Me?” I pouted. “How about that lunatic ex-boyfriend-slash-roommate of yours that you finally got rid of? Speaking of which-”

“Oh no! Here comes the J- word,” said Chris, referring to the real name of my fake physician boyfriend formerly known as Sonny. “And we almost made it through an entire evening at Lido’s without hearing it.”

“No, listen,” I protested, as everyone else’s eyes started to roll back in their heads. “I think I finally figured Doctor Dementia out.”

“What, again?” derided Chris.

“Yeah, I was reading this website,” I said. “Three words: Narcissistic Personality Disorder.”

“Three more words,” said Chris. “Get over it!”

The banter’s like foreplay for the two of us. A way to navigate through our post-romantic friendship while reminding each other how lucky we both are to still be in each other’s lives.

Hoosierella pulled no punches: “You two are like an old married couple, you know that?”

There was still the question of what to do with 16 chocolate-flavored condoms. “Do they have an expiration date?” asked O.J.

“I dunno,” said Chris. “I guess I’ll just take them back to work and recycle them.”

I shudder to think of the symbol on the side of that recycling container.

Related posts:

1. Really Misguided Downtown Coffee Promotion

(Graphic: Out with the old metaphor, in with the new metaphor.)

This Apple fan has officially downsized his digital life and I couldn’t be happier. For the first time since the mid-1990s, I’m down to one phone number and one email address. I know, I can’t believe it, either. I’m officially calling Wednesday, June 17th, 2009, the date of my long-needed virtual house cleaning.

Like most modern humans, for many years I amassed a hefty collection of phone numbers, email addresses, and diverse means of accessing them all. You name ‘em, I had ‘em: blog email accounts; client email accounts; home numbers; mobile numbers; virtual numbers. Not to mention multiple desktop email clients, separate mobile-based email clients, and far too many voicemail accounts to keep up with.

My saving grace right before I made my last exit from Brooklyn was having at least ditched my land line to go exclusively, telephonically mobile. That didn’t last long. When I arrived in my Marina City high-rise home four years ago, I was disappointed to discover my mobile service didn’t make the move up to the 38th floor with me. Nor did an industry-standard phone jack, for that matter. (Oh, the angst I could have saved if only I had opted for a lower floor.)

At the time, the last thing I wanted was to once again fund a customer-opaque traditional telecom giant, so within short order, I got a cable modem and a shiny, happy, area-code-312 Vonage VOIP line. And for the next four years, almost every inbound caller groused to me the following words: “Why do I keep hearing my words echoing back to me?”

Sucking up my disdain for BigTel and switching to an SBC DSL modem fixed none of Vonage’s annoying echo, though it did add a trip-worthy new wire across my apartment floor from the one working phone jack until I rearranged my furniture last winter.

Next, I hoped being an early adopter of a shiny, aluminum-backed Edge iPhone in 2007 might be the telephonic Holy Grail I was looking for. But all the handset’s metal rump did was eliminate any possibility of a 2G signal actually getting through. Instead, I spent two years giving out my Vonage number and setting it to simul-ring my iPhone. So in order to have my mobile ring at all, I couldn’t event tell people what its number was.

Oh Arturo, prince of irony.

I found myself hiding the unhappiness and shame of my foiled attempts at making it easy for people to contact me by fetishizing my email points of contact. Specifically, the numerous folders I could populate with the myriad email addresses I was signing into from my Macbook’s Mail.app client. Sure, I couldn’t access or even see those same folders on my iPhone with it’s aggressively POP-friendly interface, but, hey, aren’t Apple products cool? (I must think so, since I’ve had 11 Macs in 12 years.)

Like iCal, for instance. Without paying $99 a year for magic MobileMe service to sync appointments between iPhone and Macbook on the go, I couldn’t be completely sure of schedule conflicts in my calendars until my nightly tethering of one device to the other. And To Do lists done on my desktop simply stayed in jail there with no hope of parole to my mobile handset. But with all my telephone heartache, I had to believe in some form of 21st-century technology.

And then my neighbor, Mattcountant, came over last week with his 3G iPhone and I saw the light. With the device’s smudgy, radio-friendly, black-plastic backplate, the guy had all sorts of 2G and 3G service all over my apartment.

Oh how the floodgates have fallen since.

It took me ten minutes to upgrade to a (quietly still in-stock) $149 iPhone 3G at the Michigan Avenue Apple Store (no “S”, thanks, the new feature set wasn’t personally compelling), though my mobile number retains its erroneously outer-neighborhood area code 773.

It took me 11 minutes and 37 seconds to disconnect Vonage. I’d read all the cancellation horror stories regarding attempts by the seemingly desperate VOIP provider to cajole/beg/bully subscribers into sticking around, so I had my script ready.

The call would have been shorter if I hadn’t had to repeat five times to an increasingly aggressive customer service representative, “Please disconnect my service and cancel my account. I am not telling you why, and I’m disclosing no further information to Vonage.” Although I thought trying to suck me in by asking me if I was related to famed British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a particularly inspired ploy.

After ditching my $420-a-year buggy Vonage number (and tossing the dusty blue router in the trash), just to hedge my bets I laid down $30 for a year of Skype service and downloaded the Skype mobile app to my iPhone. I didn’t need to. While 3G is spotty in my apartment, 2G works like a charm.

To wit, dear AT&T: I apologize for dissing your local 2G service for the past two years due to Apple’s 2007 decision to place metallic form over function. Though with not a small sense of gleeful vindication I would note that Skype over my iPhone on my home WiFi network works better than Vonage wired into my modem ever did.

So telephone pare-down sussed. But wait, there’s more. No hyperfocusing ADDer worth their unnaturally tenacious salt–like me –would ever stop at that. There was still that pesky email issue to deal with.

But what was a boy with a lifelong addiction to Apple software to do?

In my case, get over it. I hopped into my technological time machine of shame, set course for 2006, and spent the first three days of this week teaching myself how to use Gmail and Google Calendar. The former exclusively via its online interface. The latter for the first time at all.

Then on Wednesday, I:

• Set Gmail to check the mail at my legacy email addresses;
• Imported my four-year legacy email archive into my Gmail All Mail folder;
• Imported my iCal calendars into Google Calendar;
• Downloaded Google’s menubar notifiers for my Macbook and Google’s Mobile app for my iPhone;
• Dragged my Mail.app Dock alias to the trash (I know you Windows folks are all like Huh? at this point); and
• Readded Gmail to my iPhone via cloud-friendly IMAP.

Then for good measure, I added my To Dos into the Tasks list that lives in Goolgle Calendar.

By Wednesday night I was thoroughly exhausted. But here’s what the exhaustion got me:

• One phone number. Period.
• One email address. Period.
• The ability to manage all of my email messages, appointments, and To Dos equally, in real-time, from my desktop or mobile phone. For free.

That and lots of peace of mind from not having to juggle so hard to keep many needlessly duplicative bowling pins of my online life flying through the air at one time. My email signature, letterhead, and Facebook have all been happily edited to reflect the changes.

I know some of you are sneering at how late to the game I am here. For the others among you who read this post with some awe, trust me, I tell you the effort was worth it. Now do me a favor and throw my old 312 number in the trash.

After all, what good is an allegedly prestigious area code in an age where the stock answer to “What’s your number?” is “I’ll call you so you can put it in your phone”?

Related posts:

1. Slide to Unlock…
2. Round Building, Round Phone Jack
3. Bad Apples