Hamptons Subway Giving Away Apples to Riders for Holidays

SCENE ON THE SUBWAY

Spotted last night on a subway going from Westhampton Beach to Quogue were eight tiny reindeer, one with a glowing red nose. We are looking into this. (Note: Ask Mr. Aspinall if we can put this in.)

Our new marketing director A.I. Ponsie, formerly director of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, has been hired to be the new marketing director for Hamptons Subway. His first marketing promotion is to give out one shiny red apple to every passenger who boards every subway car between Saturday morning Dec. 21 and Tuesday evening, Christmas Day, Dec. 24. It’s Hamptons Subway’s Christmas present to all.

APPLES

He’s ordered a tremendous number of apples. Each commuter going to work in the morning will have a shiny red apple shoved into their chest as they board their train and then get a second apple boarding the train on their way home. Refusing the gift is not allowed. And eating on the subway is also not allowed, as you know. As a result, a rider could collect a tremendous number of apples during these four days. Indeed, a first prize will be given out to whomever sends a photograph by email of the largest pyramid of apples next to a decorated Christmas tree by Dec. 25 at 10 p.m. Send the photo to Apples.Galore.Hampton.com. First prize will be an Apple computer screen cleaning wipe.

Ponsie is giving out such a vast number of apples to make up for the disastrous marketing program run by his predecessor, Herman Herman, a turkey giveaway on Thanksgiving Day, which went ahead without any advertising and furthermore too late for everybody’s Thanksgiving meal. Herman the next day then delivered the leftover turkeys not to food pantries in the community but to fine restaurants where Herman frequently dines. When he told Commissioner Aspinall “Let them eat cake” after the botched giveaway, the commissioner fired him on the spot – which he so richly deserved.

“With apples,” Ponsie said, “nothing can go wrong.”

Meanwhile, Commissioner Aspinall, learning of Ponsie’s new promotion a week before it was announced, bought stock in the Apples Everywhere Company of Ronkonkoma, New York, the monopoly that handles all apple wholesale transactions on Long Island. “Everybody else should have done that, too,” the commissioner said afterwards. “This is not rocket science.”

HOMELESS BUT HAPPY

A homeless couple has been found living in an abandoned subway tunnel warehouse between Hampton Bays and East Quogue. They are a happy couple who say their names are Jim and Alice and they have decorated their little abode with sofas, a coffee table, lamps, club chairs and a TV. Without electric lines they are all props of course, but they’ve been in residence now about a year, undisturbed, they say. Reporters from all the media want interviews with them, but Alice says they will only do that by appointment. So to book a time, call Hamptons Subway headquarters in Hampton Bays and ask to speak to Karen, who is serving as their secretary. They will make themselves available every afternoon Monday to Friday between 3 and 5.

OUR CHRISTMAS PARTY

That was quite an affair we had in the cafeteria at subway headquarters in Hampton Bays last night. About 100 employees attended.  It’s not often you see our Commissioner Bill Aspinall running around without any clothes on. But he certainly is a fine specimen of a man. A robbery apparently took place while the party was going on. We think it was an inside job. Someone or several someones during the festivities at great effort hauled hundreds of thousands of no-longer-used subway tokens out of the basement storage room in two giant burlap sacks. It was too much for them though – it was about 600 pounds of tokens all together – and the sacks with the tokens were soon found in the woods on Ponquogue Avenue just 100 yards away along with muddy footprints, so we think we can figure out which of our employees this was. There were also beer bottles. Since the tokens were replaced with swipe cards 20 years ago and are no good, we do wonder what these perps were thinking. Well, it will all come out in court. So much for greed.

RATS ON THE WAINSCOTT PLATFORM

The giant brown rats scurrying around on the Wainscott platform early last Wednesday morning were taken care of at noon by environmentalists using dart guns tipped with a sleeping potion. They were gently transported to the woods up along Little Noyack Path. So it’s safe to go back there, girls.

COMMISSIONER ASPINALL’S MESSAGE

The fashion photo shoot held on our Southampton platform during the morning rush hour last Wednesday by that magazine Vanity Fair that women seem to read a lot took place without either permission or permits from Hamptons Subway. Apparently, the photographers were very insistent that not only the models in their nightgowns stand perfectly still during the actual photo taking, but also the straphangers racing off to work were required to stand still like statues for as long as 30 seconds. Many of them subsequently complained to our office. Then, they could rush off, but some of them had to stop in their tracks again, since the subways don’t come except at 12-minute intervals. This was very inconvenient, they told us, since many riders were carrying Christmas purchases and they should not have been treated this way.