Adventures In Busing.

It’s another Monday. For a moment it felt like my work weeks had become routine until I started thinking about what this time last week was like. It was cloudy with a threat of thunderstorms later in the day, and warm enough that it almost felt like summer. Because of the threat of rain I parked in a lower level of the parking garage and hoped I’d remember which one it was in the afternoon. This week the morning temperature was close to freezing, even as I seemed to be driving right into the sun. I parked on the roof of the parking garage and I hope I’ll remember that this afternoon.

Between last Monday and today I’ve gotten either allergies or a mild cold. I’m allergic to very few things that I know of, none of them plants, but our bodies change over time. Maybe there’s something in the air that’s got me sneezing and coughing. To be on the safe side I took both an allergy medication and a cold remedy and let them sort it out. That worked though I’m no closer to solving the mystery of what I have, and there’s enough overlap between the symptoms the two drugs treat that further testing hasn’t cleared things up even if it’s mostly cleared up my nasal congestion.

Last Monday I rode the elevator up to my office alone, which isn’t unusual. Most people who work here, I think, arrive later, when the building has automatically unlocked, so they don’t have to deal with the extra step of scanning their ID card to get in. This morning, though, when I got in there were five other people already in the elevator, and one of them motioned for me to come on in so I didn’t feel I could wait for the next one. I stepped in and hoped I wasn’t crowding the others with my backpack with my laptop, my folio bag, my lunch, and my ukulele. I said, “I know I’ve got a lot of baggage but I’m seeing a therapist.”

I thought this might at least get a chuckle instead of the uncomfortable shifting and one person murmuring affirmatively, but maybe next week I’ll have a chance to try it on a different group.

Only seven months after being rear-ended we finally have our own car back. I’ve been driving the rental car since December and, in a funny coincidence, got a notice that it needed to be returned because it was being recalled shortly before I was due to return it because the repairs on our CRV were finally done. And it was a relief because I was in a cold sweat every time I had to drive the rental car anywhere. I was afraid any scratch, dent, or major collision would mean starting the whole process of dealing with insurance companies all over again. The company that covered the person who hit me back in September made that experience so frustrating and difficult I didn’t want a repeat of it.

Dealing with the car rental place, on the other hand, couldn’t have been easier When I returned the Ford EcoSport there were three or four employees there at the time. The young woman who’d helped me back in December when I came to pick it up was still there and she asked me, “How did we do?” I said, “It’s been the nicest part of the whole experience.” And then I realized that might sound like damning with faint praise so I added that they’d been so nice and so helpful and I really appreciated how easy they’d made this one part of what was otherwise a terrible experience.

They all seemed surprised and really pleased by this feedback which surprised me. Of all the professions I’ve heard criticized throughout my entire life “car rental office employee” doesn’t even make the list. Aside from occasional inventory flubs—giving someone a compact when they’d asked for a pickup truck, maybe, or having to charge someone for returning a car with an almost empty gas tank—I’d guess most people find the car rental experience as enjoyable as I did. And in fact I had plenty of time to see that was the case. They told me Carl, their regular pickup-and-dropoff guy was out but that he’d be back soon to give me a ride to the car repair place. Then they asked me to take a seat in the waiting area and they went back to work.

Fifteen minutes went by. Half an hour. Forty-five minutes.

I started to feel taken for granted. Hadn’t I told them what a great job they’d done, just under an hour ago? But I wasn’t going to be the one to ruin their day and went to the desk and politely reminded them I was still there.

They all apologized and one of the guys said, “I’ll give you a ride.”

We climbed into a pickup truck and had a nice five minute conversation—honestly I could have walked to the car repair place in less time than I spent waiting. And we passed by Carl, headed back to the rental place.

While I was walking through a local park I saw a couple of people trying to fly a kite. It was a pretty cool looking kite—octagonal, I think, and bright red. So basically a paper stop sign, but with long red streamers. I stopped for a couple of minutes to watch but they never could get it aloft, probably because there wasn’t enough room to run. The park’s walking trail goes around  a golf course and there’s only a narrow strip of open grass for non-golfers and that’s where the couple was trying to fly their kite. Maybe it’s just as well they didn’t get it up in the air. Chances are it would come down in the middle of the golf course, maybe on the head of some angry golfer.

When I was in fifth grade my class did a special project on kites in March. And by “special project” I mean if we brought kites to school we’d be given a special time to fly them on the playground. I’m not sure why this was different from any other year—March can always get pretty windy, but I think our teacher was very conscious of how much we’d been kept inside that winter and thought kites would be a good way to get us to go outside and really run around. That’s why any kid who didn’t have a kite was also allowed to go too and assist. My parents also thought it would be fun and took me out to buy a kite. Before we left I went through my saved allowance and found two dollars, which I figured would be enough for a kite, and I was right. My parents were looking at some elaborate and more expensive kites but I found one I liked that was just two dollars. My parents thought this was funny–they thought I was being cheap and were offering to buy one of the slightly more expensive kites, but it was a point of pride to me to buy my own kite. I also really liked the cheap one. It was black with red and yellow eyes—rather disturbing, really, but I’d just seen Godzilla vs. Hedorah and I liked that it looked a bit like the smog monster.

It also had fifty-foot long streamers which, at the time, seemed impossibly long, but on the playground with a friend helping me I got Hedorah high up into the air.

It was a lot of fun and has me thinking about how it would be fun to get a kite now. The hard part is finding a place to fly one where it won’t run the risk of descending on the head of an angry golfer, but on the bright side there are a lot of kites that aren’t much more expensive than they were when I was a kid, and anyway I have more than two dollars.

There’s something nice about buying things the old fashioned way. Ordering something online may be convenient and at least the big retailers make returns easy if you what you get isn’t exactly what you were expecting. Facebook Marketplace is also a source of a lot of great, sometimes unintentional comedy. For those who like an adventure—who are looking for a deal on a used car or maybe just want to get stabbed in a dark parking lot—Craiglist is still going and has even added discussion forums to what it offers. There’s even one for writing which sounds really fun…oh no. After just a quick glance I’m never going there ever again.

Admittedly I’m not sure the best way to sell a bike is to chain it to a street sign, even on a really busy corner. The seller is asking $120 but might as well have added “Can also be yours for the price of a set of bolt cutters.” I respect, though, that what you see is what you get and I assume the seller is nearby—this is right next to a college campus so they probably live in one of the dorms. There’s also a Starbucks right across the street—no surprise, I know, but the seller might be there on a regular basis, making it even easier to arrange the transaction.

It’s a shame I’m not in the market for a bike.

Source: BlueSky

Hopefully the end of the refrigerator saga is near. It couldn’t be delivered earlier because we had to have a plumber come in and install a new water line. One of the benefits of working from home is I don’t have to take time off from work to meet technicians—I’d rather save my time off for things I actually want to do. Also it gives me an excuse to get away from them while they’re working. When I took time off from work I was never sure if I should stay around and watch them work or just go to the farthest part of the house from wherever they were and do nothing as quietly as possible. And they always seemed to want my input on whatever they were working on.

“So it looks like I should use a Feiser wrench to attach the flange to the output lever. What do you think?”

And I’d say, “Yeah, that sounds great,” while thinking, look, just because I’ve got a Star Trek t-shirt on doesn’t mean I know anything about engineering. Granted the one time I didn’t get asked what I thought was the summer we had a couple of guys install a new furnace. They spent eight hours in the crawlspace hammering and clanking away while I stayed upstairs doing nothing as quietly as I could. A few months later when it got cold and the heat came on we discovered they’d neglected to hook up a pipe correctly and the furnace was pouring carbon monoxide into the basement. By that time the company they worked for had gone bankrupt so we called in someone else who not only told us it should have only been a four hour job, at most, but the guys who’d done it had put it in backwards. Then he turned to me and said, “So we’ll get that fixed, and do you want the Spangler switch to be set to process secondary outputs on the two-twenty readout?”

“Yeah, that sounds great.”

What’s always fun, though, is when they ask me what I do. I tell them I work for a library and sometimes they’ll ask what exactly I do for the library.

“Well, I input metadata so users can access citations from a variety of aggregators through a graphical interface. So, anyway, what do you think, should we be using a proxy server to provide IP authentication for off-site users?”

I’m guessing that sounds great.

Back when I rode the bus regularly there would be at least a couple of times each week when I’d stay at work slightly longer than I should have. This was my own fault; my boss would sometimes stop by and say, “I’ve got one thing for you to do but it can wait ‘til tomorrow if you have to go,” and I’d say, “I can do it now!” This was partly because I knew that if I waited I’d forget what it was in the morning, and in most cases it would take me at least as long to write a detailed note to myself as it would to just go ahead and do it, but also because I have really lousy time-management skills. And the whole time in the back of my head there’d be a voice saying, “You can either hurry up and leave and wait for the bus or you can wait and have to hurry,” although most of the time it didn’t matter because Nashville buses are always at least fifteen minutes behind schedule. That is, even if I stayed at work an extra five or ten minutes I’d still get to the bus stop in time to stand around and watch traffic go by.

Most days my lousy time management skills aren’t a problem because working from home has cut down my commute to a few feet but Mondays are my day to be in the office. By now I should have gotten used to that, and I did get up early this morning. Maybe I got up too early. I finished taking the dogs out and feeding them, then took a shower and got dressed, the whole time thinking I was running late.

In retrospect it was that thinking that was my undoing. With everything done I went into the kitchen to get my keys, ready to go, but when I checked the time I was about fifteen minutes ahead of my usual schedule. Fifteen minutes to relax, let the sun come up, maybe even have  a bite of breakfast. By the time I’d done all that I was, well, a couple of minutes behind. But I thought I could make that up on the way. Then I was out the door and in the driveway before I realized I’d forgotten something so I had to go back.

Once I got on the road at least I managed to make good time, and it looked like my habitual procrastination wasn’t going to be a problem. At one point it even looked like I’d get to work early.

Then I got stuck behind a bus.

I was fifteen minutes late.