I went nearly two blessed years without having commute regularly into Washington from our home in Northern Virginia, so I had forgotten how incompetent the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority is at running a functional and efficient Metro system. WMATA has worked overtime to remind me since in the four months since my return to the commuting life.

I spend most of my commute on Virginia Railway Express — that’s another whiny story — but I do take a brief trips on Metro each day, from L’Enfant Plaza to Metro Center and back. I exit Metro Center at G and 12 streets. The escalators there have worked maybe 15 percent of the time since I joined the David All Group.

Today I noticed the chicken-scratched sign above. Metro’s incompetence even extends to signage. What, you raise our fares twice this summer but still can’t afford a good sign?

Sadly, the failures of our capital city’s public transportation are escalating (pun intended). Here’s a telling nugget from a May column in the Washington Examiner:

[A] year later, after millions of dollars have been funneled to WMATA and customers subjected to fare hikes, has service improved? On April 29 last year when I last wrote on these pages about WMATA there were fifty three escalators outages, and nine unexpected service disruptions.

One year later, there were 63 escalator outages and 14 disruptions. Not only have service conditions not improved with increased government support, they have gotten worse!

All the more reason to appreciate the all-too-brief respite I had as a telecommuter.