Adventures in public transport (English casual surrealism edition).

[hirez]

Escaped early from $work, where it has been far away feckwit week, clambered over the careless bags piled by people proceeding in a Christmas-homewards direction and found a bus at the end of it.

Bus bus bus it went up the road like a bus.

At the depot (good word, depot. You don't hear it much any more, and if you do it should be in a cockney accent from under a flat cap: 'Daahn ver depot, geezah') the bus is waved to a halt by a chap wearing an OpenBSD jacket. Apparently the bus we are on is about to explode and would we all like to sod off this one and pile on to the unmarked bus in front?

We duly pile.

There are six of us. On the allegedly exploding bus, we were arranged about the interior in a studidly careless manner. On the unmarked, cold and not-exploding bus, we arranged ourselves in exactly the same way.


(I lied about the OpenBSD jacket.)

Comments

[avocadovpx.livejournal.com]

>> On the unmarked, cold and not-exploding bus, we arranged ourselves in exactly the same way.

Yes, people are exactly that way, aren't they? As kids, we yell "same seats" when embarking on a return trip. By the time we're adults, no one has to say it -- it's law.

[echo-echo.livejournal.com]

I've noticed this phenomena too. I once sat in a different seat. The person who was sitting there shot me a look of "The cheek! You are sitting in MY seat" but didn't actually go so far as to say anything. But it is definitely something people do. Give them an identical bus and pretty much you can guarantee they will sit in the same seats.

[nemesis-to-go.livejournal.com]

There was a time when one of the key constant factors in my life was the front-right seat on the top deck of a MCW Metrobus on the N97 night bus route out of Trafalgar Square.

These days, I sometimes select the front left seat, just to show that I'm a wild and crazy guy who knows how to live life on the edge.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

If I were properly rock&roll like Mr Modulate above, I'd sit in the back seat of the bus with all the hard kids. As it is, it's the one forward of that on the driver's side. It's where the emergency exit lives (on most of the single-deckers run by FirstBusMobilePoxLabs anyway) so there's enough legroom for the normal-sized.

[spride.livejournal.com]

Exit row on a bus. That's so you. :-)

[spride.livejournal.com]

I once heard an analogy for the Pauli Exclusion Principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_Exclusion_Principle) likening the behavior of electrons to single people who all take up single seats of a pair in a bus rather than sitting in twos when a seat is still free. Seems that it's just a more forceful version of this :)

[spride.livejournal.com]

Correction: it was Hund's Rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hund's_rule) which derives from Pauli. But you all knew that.