The news this week is no news, which is good news. This past weekend the bus schedules changed, though not as much as the drivers, with the shake-up of their route assignments. Last Friday morning the riders bade good-bye to our regular driver for some time. We’ll miss her, we said, and jokingly added that we’d now have to break in the new ones. Actually no one this week has had to called out, “No, no, you’ve missed the turn-off,” or “you’ve missed a stop,” or “what are we doing in Tukwila?” The new drivers after all the shake-ups I’ve experienced over the years have been well prepped. The one exception was because it was not part of the written script. One afternoon years ago, on the trip from Tacoma to Seattle, the driver was alerted by radio to a traffic accident ahead on I-5, so she turned off to take the Valley Freeway. Normal procedure in these situations, when buses are timely warned but car drivers often aren’t. The bus sped along, and all was going well until we got to Renton and she didn’t know how to get back to I-5, having missed the turn-off. But neither did her passengers, who were making all kinds of conflicting suggestions. Yet no one got angry, because we understood the humor in the blind-leading-the-blind situation, and were getting to see parts of Greater Renton not on the tourist maps. Besides, the bus did finally reconnect to I-5, and no one was lamenting about missing the first act of “Parsifal” at the Opera House. A sense of camaraderie and humor on the bus makes the commute all the more enjoyable, as well as a Schadenfreude about all the single person cars stuck in the traffic jam that afternoon. So, no news this week about misadventures with new drivers, and that’s good news.
Wallace, staff
No comments:
Post a Comment