Insert your own clever "change a lightbulb" joke here

I'll admit it. I've been known to make a negative comment about the Baltimore subway every now and then. But with the recent eruption of violence at various subway and light rail stops, I trusted that the MTA would be on top of things and make something as simple as parking lot lighting a priority. Not so.

Since daylight savings time kicked in a few weeks back, the parking lot at the Owings Mills metro station has been very dark from 5 p.m. on. At least half of the lights seem to be out and even the ones that were on didn't exactly cast off much light.

The parking lot there has also been under construction for a full year now, meaning that in addition to a dark lot, I also get to take a circuitous muddy route twice each day.

My husband and I took it upon ourselves to contact the MTA to let them know about the lights that were out. This was far more of a challenge than it should have been.

Rich called the MTA last Monday night to report the outages and the woman who answered said that wasn't her department and she couldn't forward the message. He said something to the effect of "I thought you might want to know considering the crime that's being going on lately at the stations" and the woman said "There's no crime there," and she hung up on him.

When we tried calling back, he was put on hold for a while and then disconnected. Eventually I called back on the cell phone and they said I could call the MTA comment line between 8 and 6 to report it. He called back the next day.

A week later, I arrived back to another dark parking lot. This time I'd programmed the MTA comment line into my cell phone and seeing as how it was only 5:40 p.m., figured it was the perfect time to call. But, after being on hold for 20 minutes, the comment line closed and kicked me over to a looped recording. It told me to press 1-6 to leave a comment. I pressed 1-6 and then I got the same message again. When I got home, I went to the MTA website to post a complaint.

My husband's actions yesterday, however, proved to be far more effective. Fed up with being unable to get through to anyone on any of the various phone lines set up for rider comments, he starting contacting some news organizations and politicians about the lights. Then, last night, on Channel 11's 11 p.m. newscast, success! They had a reporter out there showing the lights being changed.

It's disgusting that it took so much time and effort to get a few lightbulbs changed. The MTA claims it only became aware of the light situation yesterday, so to me that basically says they haven't had any MTA police or staff even glance at the parking lot in nearly a month. Pardon me for not feeling exactly, um, safe.

But what's today's lesson? Don't piss us off. Eventually we're going to get our way so let's just make it easy, okay?

So yay for Rich and as my dad proudly noted, "Keep complaining."