~Wednesday~ In an anomaly, the 7:45 bus was not early, and in fact didn’t come until 7:55.
When taking a seat on the bus, I always put my bags—a laptop bag and a soft-sided briefcase, both black—in the window seat and I take the aisle seat. That’s as much as I ever think about it, unless the bus gets so full—which thankfully is rare—and it looks like strangers are going to have to sit with people without candy. Then, I start thinking, “I wish I’d’ve taken the window seat so that it doesn’t look like I don’t want anyone to sit with me.” Even if I don’t.
A young couple—a guy and a girl—sat across the aisle from me and one row back, and the earspray that was coming from them was very loud. Before turning to look, I thought, “Somebody’s going to have hearing loss before they’re 30.” When I did look, they were both looking down into the lap of the guy, and I think they may have been looking at some sort of electronic gadget, such as a DVD player perhaps playing a music video.
A passenger sitting up front near the bus driver asked, “Which bus it the DMV bus?” Usually people pounce on a question like that to help, but it took a second, presumably while trying to parse the question: “The DMV bus? There’s no route called DMV. What does DMV stand for? Oh! Division of Motor Vehicles. She’s asking which bus to transfer to to get down to the DMV.”
“It’s the Wake Med bus,” someone responded.
At the McKimmon stop, a couple got on with a child in a stroller. I was surprised when the woman plopped the stroller down in the aisle with the child still in it and rolled it to the back of the bus, as I remember a few weeks ago a driver saying in the same situation, “You have to take the baby out of the stroller.”
The lady’s partner or husband and presumably the father of the baby paid their fare and then joined them in the back. Before taking off, the bus driver, looking in the rear view mirror, said, “Ma’am? Ma’am? Excuse me, ma’am?” and when she finally heard him, “Do me a favor and hold onto that stroller.”
She must have rolled her eyes or some such thing, because then he added, “They say you supposed to take the baby out and fold it up (presumably the stroller, not the baby), but I ain’t going through all that.”
At this point, I started thinking about what the baby might be thinking, as the parents just wouldn’t let it go:
Daddy: “I ain’t folding up no stroller. Pffft. I seen plenty of strollers on this bus not folded up.”
Mama: “Shoot don’t be telling us to fold up no stroller. I ain’t got no time for that. We ain’t on this bus long.”
Daddy: “They be making these rules ridiculous. Nobody goin’ to be tellin’ me how to act. Ain’t foldin’ up no stroller. It’s never so crowded on this bus to fold it up.”
My work day was absolutely jam-packed today, with three main things going on:
- Getting and posting the electronic updates for today’s University Information Technology Committee meeting
- Attending a meeting for my boss’s boss on a new university-wide purchasing process for desktop and laptop machines
- Working on the presentation that my colleague and friend, Jen, are giving at the UNC CAUSE 2010 conference in Wilmington next Tuesday.
Walking across The Brickyard on the way to that (item #2 above) meeting, I took in the large crowd that had gathered around “The Brickyard Preacher” near which there was a huge sign that asked, “Does my life have meaning?”
I find it interesting that that guy can draw a pretty decent sized crowd of students and fairly often—it makes me wonder why they stand there and listen to him, but most likely don’t make it to church on Sunday.
I think it has something to do with the fact that they get to yell at the guy, and challenge him, and just walk away yelling, “Fuck you!” at him if they want to. Hey maybe someone should start a church like that—one that facilitates discussion instead of just bull-horning.
Speaking of churches, please do be sure to give this guy access to your bank account:
I went for a very late lunch, at around 3:30, and I asked the lady working at Li’L Dino to put exactly four jalapeños on my sandwich and to spread them out evenly such that I’d be sure to not get more than one in any one bite.
She laughed when I asked that, and when she was done she motioned with her hand in a sort of “Ta-da!”
And I said, “That’s beautiful. Much like yourself.” She just beamed as she wrapped it up to go.
I caught the 6:30 city bus home, by which time it was dark out.
Let me ask this question: “What’s so hard to understand about the customer not being able to see outside the bus when the interior lights are glaringly bright and it’s totally dark outside?”
I mean is that a hard concept to grasp? Evidently, we’re just supposed to guess as to whether the next stop is ours or not.
Dancing was fun tonight, although I wish we’d’ve had more dancers there. It was kind of dead until sometime between 9:30 and 10:00, when just a boatload of people came in.
Carl still has that medical boot on his left foot, but he taught a lesson—the dance Bumpers—from the side as Michael stood up in the front middle as someone to watch while interpreting the steps Carl was calling out.
Bob was there, and he told me three jokes that I loved, all sort of Halloween-related:
- How do you repair a Jack-o-lantern? With a pumpkin patch.
- What do you call a skeleton that doesn’t work? Lazy bones!
- How come the ghost didn’t have any children? Because he had a Hallow Weenie!