Bitchin' about the bus

This afternoon I had to take the small QM1A home. I don't like the small bus. But I will accept it. There is hardly a chance of getting a seat to oneself on the small bus, and the seats themselves are smaller, tighter than that preferred express bus seats.

The bus is old, very bumpy, rocky. No overhead rack for bags, and not enough seats! This should be an outrage, since we pay $5 a trip for this ride. But like good New Yorkers no one complains, except, occasionally, to each other. Today the bus was also too hot. AC seemed to be struggling.

I have developed my own survival strategy, of course. On the big comfortable express bus, I sit really close to the back to reduce my chances of having to share a seat with anyone. On the smaller bus, with fewer seats, you have to have a different technique. If it's available, I like to grab the first sideways-facing seat behind the left-hand row of forward-facing seats. Now, I PREFER a forward-facing seat, but I prefer even more to ride without someone else touching me. It was in the 90s outside today; many of us were sleeveless, with sweaty, sticky skin.

That seat was available, so I sat there and I took up more than my butt's worth of the seat. Another lady got on two stops after me and sat on the same bench, but put distance between us and put her bag up next to her -- fine, as long as it wasn't touching me. The space between me and her was wide enough to fit another person. That's what the seat is made for, three people. But it is not an ideal seat, because if you're stuck there it can be tight, between two people, so it's usually not the first seat selected. In the worst case scenario, if every other seat was taken and someone had to sit there, I had left about four inches of seat to my left so I could shift over. You give the ILLUSION that there's not enough room, to further dissuade passengers from sitting there. There was also at least a foot of space between the side of my seat and the back of the other seats. Roomy. Nice.

I had good luck today, as it turned out. We pulled away from the last stop in Manhattan, 3rd Avenue and 57th Street, no one sat in that seat, and I succeeded in not having to touch anyone for the rest of the trip.

A cell phone chatterer, however, plunked herself into the seat just opposite me and continued to talk. Blah, blah, blah. It was time for my Ipod to come out. Time also to try to finish this God-awful book I am reading called "The Weight of Numbers." It's a 420-page book and I was on page 359 -- I could potentially finish it on the ride home. Would there be a point? I hoped so, but nothing so far had led me to believe there would be...