When it rains it pours

Dear readers ... if you're still out there ... sorry, it has been a while. A combination of lack of truly notable travesties and laziness on my part has resulted in a year and a half of blog silence. Ok, let's be honest, it's mostly laziness, because even though I have a relatively short quiet commute to and from school most days, there is always someone doing something wrong on transit.

So after months of minor infractions not worthy of my effort to write about, this week there were two travesties that I could no longer ignore.

Travesty the first:
It was Monday. For some reason the Pacific Northwest is trying to mimic actual winter this year, so for not the first time this season, I woke up to snow. It was coming down quite heavily near my apartment, though not enough to cancel school. So I hop on the bus and don't think too much of it when we make a small detour, the purpose of which, I assume, was to avoid a short but steep hill at the beginning of the route which was probably quite slippery in the wet snow.

That should have been my clue that this ride was going to end poorly for me. But I blissfully ignored that warning sign and zoned out as usual for the next half an hour of my ride.

Then we reached the last stop before campus. And the driver makes an announcement, "Just so you know, we are on snow route detours around campus today." And that was it. No information about what this route might be and how far from my stop I was about to end up. And for that matter, no justification for why we were making a snow detour when it was now raining and there was no snow on the roads by campus at all. Of course, it meant exactly what I feared it meant ... instead of turning up the hill towards campus and my office, we went straight down around the bottom of the hill. Someone pulled the stop cord, and when the bus came to its first stop near the university gym, there was a strange delay while people looked around trying to decide if they should get off or just stay on the ride and see where they ended up. I got off because we were already well past my office and only getting farther from there. Eventually many people decided to do the same.

So now instead of being dropped right in front of my office, I have to schlep my butt up a bajillion stairs first thing in the morning in the almost freezing drizzle as well as back track around the main campus road back to my office building. Awesome. Especially awesome when the only reason I take this bus, whose route is about 10 minutes longer than the other bus to campus that comes by my apartment, is exactly because I DON'T HAVE TO WALK 10 MINUTES ACROSS CAMPUS FROM THE BUS TO MY OFFICE. So now I've wasted 10 minutes and an uphill walk. Swell.

Travesty the second:
It's almost the end of the quarter. So I'm tired, frustrated with my students and my own work, I'm ready for a vacation and I'm perpetually on edge with no patience left. I say this because this particular type of incident has happened many times during these months of blog silence, but this morning it was the straw that broke the camel's back. So here it is ...

The city bus is NOT a tour bus. Announcements by the driver should be reserved for emergencies only. It's 8 o'clock in the morning; I haven't had my coffee yet; I'm trying to zone out, listen to my music and psych myself up for the day. I do not need this process interrupted by your freaking perky voice every 5 blocks telling me what the connecting buses are. I get that you are trying to be helpful, but the city bus is every man for himself. Read the schedule, check your phone app, ask the driver, ask someone next to you. Sink or swim. ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE. If you need to get somewhere, you figure it out.

Things I also don't need to hear include

• being told that the bus is `about to get busy' at a certain stop and that we should `choose who we want to sit next to now before we don't get a choice' and that people should `move back to make room'. Normally I'm all about telling people to get the eff to the back of the bus, but after loading all the people at this particularly busy stop, THERE WERE STILL EMPTY SEATS. Ask anyone who has ridden a bus at rush hour, if there are still empty seats, the bus may as well be empty - that's how far from being full it feels; that's how unnecessary the announcements were. 
• that we should all look at the guy up ahead spinning the sign (for some store I couldn't identify because I was not sitting in a seat where he was actually visible) because you read on your twitter feed this week that there is a sign-spinning competition in Las Vegas each year. `Can you believe that? I'm not making this up.'  ... ... Ask me if I care. Go ahead, ask. 
• that we've made it more than half way through the week after waking up early this morning and have a happy hump day. How about you go hump yourself, dude. My day would have been happier if you could have just kept your mouth shut for my bus ride. 

If eye-rolling made a sound, I would have been the loudest passenger on the bus this morning. 

So there you have it. In case you had forgotten in the last 18 months what an angry person I truly am, I hope this has been a nice reminder for you.

Update: I often take two buses home. A fast one that cuts off the long way around that the slow route I take in the morning follows, then I switch to the slow route for the last 5 stops or so. Did that this evening and guess who was driving the slow route bus that I happened to get on. JUST GUESS.

Did you say `perky unnecessary-announcement morning driver'? If so, you're right! The bus gods apparently hate me this week. 

Two buses diverge in a yellow wood

Two of the bus routes I ride regularly overlap for a small portion of their routes (we're talking like 6 blocks here people). But apparently that is enough to confuse some bus drivers who drive both routes.

Today, for not the first time I might add, I was riding the bus that is supposed to go straight at the intersection where the two routes diverge. So you can imagine my surprise when we're suddenly rounding that corner. Of course, the first time this happened I had a momentary panic that perhaps I got on the wrong bus or there was some detour that I was unaware of, but this time I knew exactly what had happened. And I knew that we were going to get to drive around in a nice circle to get going back in the right direction.

Don't worry, I didn't want to be home anytime soon. This is a nice way to cap an already mediocre Monday.

Move to the back or get punched in the back

It really is best for everyone if you just move to the back of the bus...including for yourself. Because, you see, if you don't, but then other people (who aren't jerks or idiots) who actually want to get to the back have to go around you. In order to let them pass you (kind soul that you are) you have to lean back awkwardly and probably take a bit of a step. But then that step might cause you to almost step on some poor girl's (who may or may not have a transit blog) foot. Unfortunately for you, that girl is on top of things and to prevent such a misfortune to her own foot, she is forced to jam her fist into your back to keep you from backing up.

Moral of the story: if you don't want to be punched by a passive aggressive blogger, you should just move to the back of the bus.

mom, mom, Mom, MOM, MOOOMMM

You know what's even less fun than a 30 minute bus ride at 11:30pm? The same bus ride with a shrieking toddler. The same bus ride with a shrieking toddler so loud I can hear her over my headphones. The same bus ride with a shrieking toddler whose delinquent mother is either too high or too stupid to actually do any parenting and just lets her keep yelling. I mean, you know it's bad when the bus driver has to make an announcement: "Young lady, there's no screaming on the bus." Now I don't have kids, but I kinda thought that sort of thing fell under the "parent duty" umbrella, not the "bus driver duty" umbrella.