If I could do one thing differently…
When the first bus pulled away from the stop without me on it, I knew at once that this was about to be one of those days people always say their mothers warned them about, which just goes to show you how many people actually listen to their mothers.
I knew it was hopeless. If, on the off chance that one of the buses dispatched from the station ever returned to take me to my destination (which was, in fact, the very station to which I was previously referring, hence why I chose to maintain polite scepticism at it ever returning at all, because public buses don’t work like that), I would probably end up detained by a lynch mob of angry mothers who would demand to know exactly what I was doing outside on a day like today, when it was clearly the wrong thing to do.
You’re probably thinking one thing right now, and you’re absolutely right.
It was, clearly, the wrong thing to do.
Once you have missed a bus where I live, you might as well move to another city because a bus will never come on time for you ever again.
Hell, I thought, I’m a go-getter. I can tempt fate. I decided, in the end, to keep my appointment. No sooner had I resolved to do this than another bus, emblazoned with the number of the bus I’d just determined I missed, cheerfully approached me from the distant horizon. I could see the driver cheerfully silhouetted inside, and he gave me a cheerful wave.
Then, he cheerfully drove by the the bus stop, made a “California stop” (which doesn’t include any actual stopping and makes me think that maybe time moves in reverse down in California, except I’ve been there and that’s way too normal for them), and kept on cheerfully driving down the road.
It is a little known fact that modern day bus transport is a direct evolutionary descendant of a form of torture that our Neanderthal cousins outlawed because it was too cruel a punishment to even be given a name, let alone have in a place where people were at least civilised enough to know where to sit and which stick to use when poking someone important (hint: not on the right and not the big one). The object of this was to take the Neanderthal who was to be tortured and set him within a cluster of disreputable cavemen who happened to be riding aimlessly around the wastelands and stopping at every stop that wasn’t his. This would naturally drive the Neanderthal - quite literally - out of his head. Of course, all that’s left to do after that is assist in driving the next victim out of his head, and eventually just keep going until you either run out of sane people or invent Key West. (This has been postulated as the sole reason why politicians are especially fond of rallying support for public transport, because while being an ancient and all-powerful force, it could still benefit from being made more evil through civil engineering.)
Oddly, none of this struck down my optimism, which was admittedly far too cocky at this point, and determined that my next course of action was to track down a bus of my own, timetables be damned.
And so I did. It didn’t take too long, all things considered. “Hello?” I said, knocking patiently at the door. “Are you going to the transit centre?”
I held up my bus pass - patiently - and waited for the door to open.
“No,” mouthed the driver. She instructed some children to go to the back, which was an odd thing to do, I thought, if she wasn’t going to let me on. “Go away.”
Refusing to be disillusioned, I spoke calmly and slowly, illustrating how patient I had been and how patient I was willing to be. “This is a Yakima Bus Pass. Are you not,” I enunciated, “a Yakima Bus?”
“Nope,” said the driver, and drove her school bus away.
If I weren’t such a stable person, I’d end up with a complex.
My last effort to catch a bus was actually quite successful, but it turned out to be because I was no longer trying to catch a particular bus; any bus would do. Hey, you have to take your victories where you can get ‘em. The bus cheerfully took me ten miles opposite the direction I wanted to go and then cheerfully disappeared, never to be heard from again, and especially not by the station.
The moral of this story? Listen to your mother. Just stay home.
