~Monday~ I couldn’t have been more pleased to see a heavy, male driver of the 8:15 city bus pull up to my stop this morning. With that I thought: “There’s a chance the air will be on because: 1) It’s not the regular lady driver who keeps it turned off, and 2) Since the driver’s heavy, he probably gets hot more easily and will have it on.” Stereotypical or not, presumptuous or not, accurate or not, fair or not, that’s what I thought. It was deliciously freezing on the bus.
Along Gorman street, which the Wolfline also serves, a lot of students got on this morning, probably because the Wolfline isn’t running for a week now.
A guy sitting in the center-facing seat on the right side, had a large plastic bag with him that he set on the first front-facing seat across from me. From its shape, it looked like it contained one of those large foil roasting pans. An ad about recycling was on the bag and it pointed to the URL of a company I’ve never heard of before: www.aldi.us.
In an astonishing—at least to me—turn of events this morning, the students pushed the stop tape for what I thought was the stop in front of Sakura Express. But when I looked up I saw that we’d already passed Sakura Express, and we’d already passed the Brooks Street intersection, where the infamous non-marked stops are. By the time I could process what was happening, the students had all gotten off and the bus continued on down Hillsborough Street!
That’s when it dawned on me that the route had been switched back to the old route. “Thank god,” I thought, pushing the tape to get off at my old stop right across from my work building at the intersection of Gardner and Hillsborough. Imagine my surprise as the bus plowed right past that intersection to the next stop, because obviously from that last stop, they’ve also made some changes while switching back to the original route. The next stop, at which I got off, was two blocks past my building. Bastards!
That’s the bad news. The good news is that: 1) Tomorrow I know to get off at the stop where all the students got off, which is not at the intersection of my building, but is still closer than the walk was on the detoured route—from either the Brooks/Hillsborough stop or the Clark/Gardner stop, and 2) I did note that the stop for the outbound route that I take home, is back in the same place, which is on the corner right by my building.
Here’s how it all played out graphically. The navy blue line is the return to the original route. The turquoise line is the old detoured route.
With regards to this entire re-routing for a year, and in a pastiche of a line from Gerald Ford’s Oath of Office speech, “My fellow Americans, our long, local nightmare is over.” What will I bitch about now?
Today, I was introduced to the concept of a “Silent Disco,” which I’d never heard of before. Wikipedia describes it this way, and notes that it shouldn’t be confused with a Quiet Party. This youtube.com video attempts to show one, but I don’t think it’s the most effective video. Who knew such a thing even existed?
Also today, I learned of the tragic death of a young lady who I know from hanging out at Helios coffee shop and The Borough restaurant and bar. Yesterday, in the classic “permanent solution to a temporary problem,” she took her own life at age 23. I wasn’t a friend of hers—just an acquaintance, but it doesn’t make it any less tragic and sad. R.I.P., Courtney.
I had a productive work day today, with a concentrated hour or so spent completing the minutes of last Wednesday’s Student E-mail meeting. It felt good to have them done before the night before, or morning of, the next meeting.
I was delighted to pick up the bus for my ride home pretty much right outside my building. Sweet.
I was only home long enough to woof down some dinner, and then I met Anna at DH Hill, the university library, where we brainstormed about a paper on social media that we’d like to publish together.
The topic of social media is huge, and we talked about a ton of different aspects of it, and left the meeting with two action items:
- We’re each going to secure a copy of social media policy in our workplace. That means Anna will get RTI‘s, and I’ll get both NC State University‘s, as well as the State of North Carolina‘s.
- I’m going to create and share a Google Doc with her with the main topics from our brainstorming to which we’re each going to enumerate what we could contribute to each topic.
Since I was halfway downtown—that’s my story and I’m sticking to it—I zipped by Flex for some cheap ($2.25, normally $3.75) well drinks and where Karaoke was going on. They had a new emcee tonight, and although he was fairly cute, he was young and not experienced enough with the equipment to be running the show tonight. There were a lot of “dead air” moments, which got a lot annoying in a little amont of time.
There was also some aspect of “not knowing your audience” going on, as he started off by reading—a too long, in my opinion—list of various celebreties’ reactions about the overturning of Proposition 8 in California recently. I’ll be the first to admit, however, that this may have been “a flop” more so to me as I couldn’t care one iota less about what a celebrity thinks about current events.
Somewhat bored with that, I checked Twitter on my BlackBerry, where I saw a tweet saying that @wiggitywack and @dtraleigh were over at the Flying Saucer, a bar just around the corner from Flex, for “Pint Night,” and I walked over there to say hello.
I had one beer, the same kind I had when I was there a week or so ago with Jen and her friends for Trivia Night—some summer ale—and as I started to walk away from the bar, a blond girl with a skirt on so short that if her pubic hair were a beard it would have been hanging out, tapped me on the shoulder and pointing to the floor said, “You dropped some money.”
There on the floor were two twenty dollar bills that had slipped out of my wallet when I was putting it back into my pocket. I thanked her profusely, and I immediately thought of the debacle at the Krispy Kreme in Fayetteville in which a clerk handed to a drivethru customer a doughnut box used to conceal $5,000 worth of the store’s receipts for the day. Oops. I hate it when that happens.