When the bus stop has played musical chairs
Not that they’re listening, but the people who design public transit systems should remember one cardinal rule. The bus stops are not supposed to play musical chairs.
This evening, my trip home took longer than usual because of a series of miscalculations and a set of faulty assumptions. When my regular bus didn’t arrive within the permitted window of transfer opportunity, I opted for the alternate route. In layman’s terms, that means that I head out of the city centre via another set of bus routes; on a good day, I arrive home at about the same time after seeing a whole new set of people.
Of course, the cross-town bus was delayed just enough to make an easy transfer impossible (I don’t fly), so I spent my half hour of dead time in local magazine and music shops. Distracting, yet strangely satisfying. On my way out of the music store, I set off the antitheft alarm. No, I was not a felon; sometimes the sensors are distracted by other products. I have no problem with the store owner searching my backpack, since I’ve been a loyal client for better than twenty years, and I appreciate how tight margins have become. In fact, I had a new copy of Windows 7 in the bag, and there was a small RFID strip in the packaging.
Why did I have Windows while going through a door? Well, it turns out that you can’t buy W7 in English here, so I had brought my CD in to allow a setup before a legal license arrived next week. There is a delay before activation, after all. I’m English, my software is English, we’re swimming against the current, yada yada.
But, now that it was dark, I headed over to my bus stop and took up the waiting stance. MY bus didn’t pass. Some idiot, for lack of a more polite term, has moved the stops around at a huge multi-block terminus, affecting about thirty routes. I don’t usually pass this way, I wasn’t in the communications loop. Now I know.
