The day after announcing a 25 cent fare hike, the Toronto Transit Commission couldn’t have asked for a better kind of six-hour Yonge Street subway shutdown — one that allowed them to pass the buck. TTC chair Adam Giambrone sounded like had a rough night when interviewed this morning on CP24, even though service was restored hours before they expected, at 8:25 p.m. “A third-party contractor cut a trench across the subway tunnel structure,” he explained in a sleepless rasp. “And that’s not supposed to happen.” Worried that a slab would fall on the tracks, or maybe even a train, commuters were sufficiently enraged at having to take a shuttle bus. Brad Ross, director of communications for the TTC, took to Twitter earlier this year, allegedly to field passive-aggressive complaints on a day like this one. Just how impolite can his 2,321 followers collectively get?

Noticed on the scene by a Toronto Star reporter was a crew from Link-Line, a natural gas distribution contractor, laying pipe: “There’s no accident,” said the foreman, who would not give his name.

“I’ll be paying a quarter more for this kind of crappy service starting in January,” Latoya Safe, 25, spewed to the Sun. “What if we have a terrorist attack? We don’t have an action plan in place.”

Giambrone, for his part, tweeted that he was on the scene “working with the chaos” — rather than, say, field the random bits of Twitter-rage being watched by Ross. Can these episodes ever be soothed by technology, though? The powers that be may not have figured that out yet.