“His abilities have made him…well, arrogant.”―Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones
Or mine, anyway. I’ve been riding the local bus system for a while now and I’m getting so that I don’t feel like I need to obsessively check the bus schedule 35 times before I walk out the door. I even got so cocky as to leave home Tuesday morning for a doctor’s appointment without taking my bus schedule with me. I don’t need no stinking bus schedule. Oh, how the universe does love to toy with me and my high-faluting ideas of competence. Dad Windu dropped me off early for my appointment, on his way to the Spice Mines of Kessel, so that I could get blood drawn beforehand. Mmm, nothing like needles at 8 o’clock in the morning. I read a little from Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (interesting book, but difficult to read with the ubiquitous waiting room TV blaring in the background) and got poked in the arm while listened to a 2nd grader “going to be in 3rd next year” screeching from behind closed doors that she would “stay here forever, for the next three days even, before I’m going to pee in that stupid thing!”
After my appointment, I headed out to the bus stop about a mile away. It was a nice, sunny day and, since I was heading up a rather steep hill, I wasn’t walking my fastest. As I rounded the top of the hill, I watched my 10:05 am bus round the corner and cruise on by a few minutes early. “Oh well, I’ll have to grab the next one at 10:35.” I slowed down even more and wandered over to the time placard and almost sank to my knees. This bus only runs once an hour! Every other bus I’d ever been on ran either every 15 or 30 minutes on weekdays. I ran through Kubler-Ross’ 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Unpleasant things were said. Multiple times. It was time to assess the situation. There was no bench to sit on and no fence to lean against. It was cloudless, sunny and starting to get hot. I do not have a cell phone. This sucked.
I decided to start walking. I figured that if I walked for half an hour, the bus would catch up with me going in the opposite direction and I would know when to stop walking and just wait for it to swing back around. Easy as bulls-eyeing womp-rats in my T-16 back home. I knew that there was a nice little covered bus shelter near one of the local colleges. I walked for 30 minutes. No bus had passed, but there was that lovely covered bus shelter so I stopped to wait anyway. 15 minutes later. Still, my bus had not passed. The bench wasn’t too comfortable for extended sitting. I grabbed my bag and continued walking some more. I passed one intersection after another. No bus. I walked and walked and walked. I eventually realized that I was going to be walking home. All the way home. The whole long way home because even if the bus came by at that moment, I was only one bus stop from my turn off point.
I got to the turn off point and turned, never having seen the bus. Up the road to the high school, up and over the rail overpass, back down and around the connection to the intersection, around the road construction, into my neighborhood and finally… I was home. I had left the doctor’s office at around 9:55 am and I returned home just before noon. I dragged myself to the computer and figured out the distance: 6.4 miles total in 1.75 hours (a little over 3.6 miles per hour for those of you who like stats).
Lessons learned:
- take the bus schedule with you every single flipping time;
- look at the fricking bus schedule so you know if you should be really moving to get to the bus stop on time; and
- if you’re watching to see when the bus goes by in the opposite direction – make sure you never, ever stop to check out that pretty little bunch of wildflowers growing in someones yard or focus your attention on that strange bird call overhead because the *$%@ bus will inevitably roll by when you’re not paying attention.
