Mentholatum

There comes a moment, when one is mentally composing the next blog for this series, usually during the commute hours, when one asks oneself, “Would this be appropriate, as a reporter’s item that will encourage other UPSers to use public transport? Would this report, of the opposite of fun and games aboard public transport, turn readers off, and make them stick to their private cars?”

But then I imagined some perverse, inverted universe, if UPS were trying to encourage single car commuting. Would any blog reporting an accident, or pull-over for traffic violation, discourage anyone? Hardly, since in actual life those sightings are usual in daily car commuting, with passing motorists probably saying to themselves, that’ll never happen to me, or if so, it will be mañana, a nebulous future too indistinct to worry about. Or the passing car driver in a clunker experiences Schadenfreude, if the car in the incident is very high-end. But that kind of glee would also likely not be expressed on the blog, unless the UPS blogger is oblivious to what that kind of diatribe would do to her/his campus repute.

But speculating about jeremiads against Hummer aggressors on I-5 takes me too far from what I wanted to talk about, about what we public transport commuters should report, or suppress, in reporting about our rides. Yes, not all the experiences are pleasant, no more than for the single-car motorists. The following report is one example, but also perhaps one where the reader can use in other situations.

One afternoon, an elderly man got on the Tacoma-Seattle bus. He exuded an overpowering odor, from not having bathed for months or whatever. He sat at the front of the bus, and we riders quickly moved as far away to the back as we could—fortunately the bus was half empty that afternoon. The bus driver didn’t have the option of relocating. She was stuck there at the wheel, with the man sitting three feet away. She drove as fast as she legally could to Seattle, or maybe a little faster, while periodically telling the passengers over her intercom how sorry she was about situation. (The drivers do care about us.)

Should such a situation occur in the future, I am now prepared, thanks to someone who knows about autopsies and dissections on ripe specimens. Smear a little Mentholatum in your nostrils to suppress the stench. So now I carry a little jar of it in my book bag, and you may want to carry the same salve also, not just for the bus, but also for other occasions, if for instance in a funeral cortège car you find yourself trapped sitting next to an elderly aunt with negligent hygiene.

Fortunately, this odiferous event has never been repeated on the busses I ride. The accidents and pull-overs of single car vehicles seen from the bus windows, however, occur almost daily.

Wallace, Faculty