~Wednesday~ I caught the 7:45 city bus instead of the 8:15, walking up to the stop at 7:50 just as the bus approached the intersection near my stop. I immediately replayed my last couple of minutes in my house thinking, “If I would’ve done just one more thing before coming out here, I would have missed this bus.”
Imagine for a moment that you’re a contestant on The $25,000 Pyramid and this category has been revealed: “Things You’re Never Really Comfortable Hearing Your Bus Driver Utter.” This morning when I boarded, the driver looked at me, cocked her head a little sideways and asked, “What’s the name of this street that we’re on?”
On Gorman Street, just past its intersection with Conifer Street, a police car with its blue lights flashing was parked across the lane we were traveling in and detouring traffic down Conifer. Normally this would be no big deal, but it certainly is a dilemma for a bus. All of these thoughts popped into my mind even though this particular conundrum shouldn’t even have been in my circle of concern, as it certainly wasn’t in my circle of influence:
- Maybe they’ll let the bus go through, since it does, after all, have a responsibility to pick up anyone who might be at a stop on this road beyond the detour.
- Where will it come back on this street up ahead?
- What about the people at any stop between here and where the bus returns onto Gorman?
- Those people can’t be notified that the bus is skipping their stop.
- What is causing this detour?
We actually took the first left onto a street parallel to Gorman and then the first left on that coming right back on Gorman at its next intersection, and there wasn’t a stop in between there. So, at the next stop someone got on and I mused that to that person the bus detour could fall into either of two $25,000 Pyramid categories: the elusive, “Things You Don’t Know” or the ever more elusive, “Things You Don’t Know You Don’t Know.” But I digress…
BTW: The reason for the detour—evidently a tree limb hanging close to the road had broken off and hit a power line.
We had our every-other-month University Information Technology Committee meeting from 9:30 – 11:00 and today it was in a new venue, as we had to slide the meeting out a week to accommodate our CIO’s calendar and the usual meeting room, the Faculty Senate Chambers in the D.H. Library, was not available today. So we met in Winslow Hall instead, a campus building in which I’ve never been.
The conference room has been recently refurbished, so it looked great, but more importantly, it was outfitted with technology that makes it easy to run a meeting. Though I’d caught a Wolfline bus to the building, I decided to walk back, and the first part of my route back was this lovely sight enhances somewhat, I believe, by the recent (for days) rain we’ve had:
This afternoon, I had another meeting away from the building I work in, and I had to catch the city bus, because we’re between school sessions and there are only three Wolfline buses running, none of which took me easily or directly to where I was going.
I ended up taking the city bus to my house, getting my car, and driving over to the McKimmon Center where the meeting was being held. I tweeted this about all that:
| It’s not often, but today IS one of those days in which using public transportation is not as convenient as I’d like it to be. #Run #Wait |
I was wiped out when I got home, so I napped before dancing.
Dancing was fun enough tonight. We had a good number of dancers, and there were enough bar patrons present to keep things interesting.