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Title:	A rant about public transport
Author:	Toam	Posted: 19-02-2008
Now I am usually the one telling people who complain about public transport to shut up. I guess that is mostly because of how bad the jokes are: “What is the greatest work of fiction?” “I don’t know, what is the greatest work of fiction?” “Train timetables!” “I don’t get it, train timetables aren’t works of fiction” “Technically speaking no they aren’t. However, due to trains occasionally not running to schedule, I am exaggerating the scenario to imply that no trains run to schedule and hence that the timetables that they are supposed to adhere to are, in fact, works of fiction rather than the schedule of train times that they actually are” “HAR! HAR! HAR!” Now I don’t often catch trains. I’m more of a bus man, myself. However, that is neither here nor there. However, I do agree that it is incredibly annoying if a bus (and when I say bus, I mean any form of public transport) is late and this causes you to be put out in some way. For example, if you catch a bus that gets you to work 10 minutes before you need to be there, because there isn't a bus that will get you there closer to the time you need to be there, and your bus is 5 minutes late that doesn’t matter. You might think it does but that is because of how horrifically wrong you are. You are so wrong that I am embarrassed for both of us. What I find more annoying that missing a connection due to a bus being late is missing a connection due to the connection being early. This has happened to me twice recently. It is incredibly frustrating. I get to the interchange at about 5:55pm, and my connection is scheduled to be there at 6:00pm. Excellent, I have 5 minutes to spare. OR DO I? Now, by ‘spare’ I don’t mean ‘go off and do something’, I mean ‘wait at the bus stop’. So wait, I do. I wait for 5 minutes. The bus is not yet there. “Oh well,” I think to myself “It must be running a bit behind – I’m only on my way home I don’t mind being a few minutes late." So I wait some more. Another bus that I could catch to my house pulls in to another bay. This bus takes 2 to 3 times longer to get to my house due to the route it takes. I generally only catch that if I have no other way of getting home from here. Still under the impression that my bus is a little late, I do not catch that bus. A TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE MISTAKE. I end up having to wait half an hour for the next bus that is going my way. This annoyed me considerably. Now, you may think this to be in contradiction to my previous statement about it not mattering unless it puts you out - but that is because you are wrong. If you could turn how wrong you are into a liquid you would not be able to bottle it because there is not enough glass to make a bottle large enough to fit it in. Yes, I was only going home. However, I had come from uni, and had I known I was going to have to wait half an hour, I would have left half an hour later and got half an hour more work done. But, because the only information I had to go on was the bus timetables, I had no way of knowing that this was going to happen. What annoyed me further was that, when I did get the next bus, another bus driver (who had arrived at the interchange a few moments before) came up to the driver of my bus and said, “You were supposed to leave Box Hill 2 minutes before me”. There was a brief exchange of what seems to be moderately heated words before the other driver walked off. However, my driver then got off the bus and went over to yell at him. He then got back on the bus and I heard him saying to a passenger, “He thinks he’s my supervisor but he’s just a bloody driver!” It is thanks to people such as the driver I had then that I was able to miss the bus that decided “I’m at least 5 minutes early, but that doesn’t matter because none of the other drivers here are my supervisor!”, and it is thanks to people like him that public transport in general has a bad name, and worse jokes.
219 people know that the greatest work of fiction is actually the Bible.