A Flurry of Loopiness

Public transportation may arguably be the greatest godsend in all of civilized society -- a term that can be applied (albeit loosely) to a large university like Penn State. Whenever you have a situation in which 45,000 people need to get around on a regular basis on relatively stringent schedules, it helps to know there are buses available to supplement the miles of walkways and roadways, to ease the burden of having to walk from Beaver Stadium to Pattee Library and back on a twice-daily basis.

On my many travails and traverses through the terraces of University Park, I've determined that the bus drivers tend to fall into two distinct categories: they're either really, really nice, or they're bitter and resentful old biddies. Normally the former far outweigh the latter in terms of frequency of interaction, but as the old adage reminds us, when it rains, them motherfuckers come down hard.

Yesterday was a perfect example of this kind of experience. Ever since daylight savings time ended, all my clocks have been a few minutes off of each other, which isn't such a terrible tragedy except that the last clock I see before I leave the apartment and the clock in my car are roughly six minutes apart. When my schedule of driving and bus-riding allows me painfully little room for error, six minutes is substantial, and when I entered the car and saw that I had only 20 minutes to get to the campus, hop a bus, and get to class on time, I panicked.

It took me a couple of minutes to find a reasonable parking space, at which time I exited my car and noted that a bus was waiting at the bus stop, in the process of loading and unloading its passengers.

It's at this juncture that an informative digression becomes necessary. There are four buses that navigate the campus only: the Blue Loop is a long, meandering line that runs clockwise around most of the campus; the White Loop is a counterclockwise line that features fewer stops and basically drives Curtin Road and Beaver Avenue; the Red Link is a short back-and-forth line that connects that distant extremes of University Park (from Innovation Park to West Campus and back again); the Green Link is a shorter back-and-forth from the Stadium parking lot to the Music Building (near the Library). Got it? Good.

So here I am, seeing the Blue Loop, and noting that it's the only line that drops off riders near Old Main, which just happens to be right by the Sackett Building, which just happens to be where I need to be for my class, which starts in about 13 minutes. So I do what any normal, late-but-responsible person would do.

I ran. And flailed my arms. Like a moron.

As I'm doing so, I notice the bus driver looking in my direction. Or maybe he wasn't. Maybe he was taking a gander at the open road ahead of him and thinking, "You know, if I don't head down this road soon, it may never feel this perfect again." Whether Porter Road was speaking to him or not, whether he saw me or not, it doesn't matter much at this point. He closed the door as I, the dashing fatty, was within 100 feet of the bus.

I figured maybe if I ran a little faster and flailed my arms a bit more wildly he'd stop. Instead, he pulled away. But then, catching my ridiculous-looking figure at last, he shook his head and kept on driving.

Are you fucking kidding me?

Now I was seriously screwed. My alternative was to catch the very next bus that came about and hope it dropped me somewhere near Sackett. Naturally, the next bus to come, the Green Link, has the line that goes least near to Sackett, so I had to hightail it through campus to make it to class -- late, of course, as the 1:00pm bells rang just as I walked past Old Main.

You'd think that one crappy bus-related story would be enough for one day, but no! After my stint in office hours, I was supposed to meet fellow-grad student Darrell for a trip to the gym. When I called him, he was already walking there and I was waiting amidst a huge throng of people waiting for buses at 4:00pm. The Blue Loop came to the Library and picked up as many people as it could stuff to its gills, leaving me the absolute last person to make it onto the bus. Woo hoo! My luck was to change, perhaps?

At the next stop, Darrell, who was waiting to hop the bus and find me, discovered that the life of a sardine wasn't for him and simply walked on while I continued riding. I took the Loop past the Intramural Building to the second stop after, the lot by Lubrano Park. I went to the car, grabbed my gym clothes, dumped my academic paraphernalia, moved the car to a closer spot, and returned to the bus stop. At this point, the Blue Loop would have to traverse almost the entire route (another half-hour, easily) before getting back to the IM Building, so I waited for a Link, any Link, which would have that building as its second stop.

Cue two buses, crawling down Porter Road back-to-back: the first, a Red Link; the second, a Green Link. As the Red Link approaches, I walk towards it in a manner that clearly suggests I will be boarding. But the bus never enters the stop. It just rolls on, slowly, as if teasing me, as if considering if it really wants to stop, and then drives away. I'm slightly miffed, for sure, but no worries, the Green Link right behind him will take me exactly where I want to go.

As I go to board the Green Link, the curt driver not-so-politely informs me that this is the end of her line and that I can't board. I look up at the sign indicating her route just in time to watch her change it from "GREEN LINK" to "OUT OF SERVICE." How helpful. Had she used the "OUT OF SERVICE" sign before, or the far more common "DISCHARGE ONLY," I would have made a far more aggressive effort to get the oblivious/obnoxious Red Link driver to actually stop. Now I had no bus and Darrell was probably waiting for me impatiently at the IM Building.

Since it was near the time when parking in the IM parking lot became kosher, I decided it wasn't worth walking there, since the time I'd wait before moving the car would be roughly equivalent, so I gave myself a few minutes to wait for the next Link and established a drop-dead time for giving up on the bus. One minute before that time -- and almost 20 minutes after the out-of-service Green Link left (during which time, I should note, FOUR Blue Loops came and went) -- a Red Link finally pulled up.

I wanted to be really pissed, and in fairness, I was. But damn it, just when I'd had my fill of shitty bus drivers for the day, I was greeted by a very pleasant woman who welcomed me aboard with a smile and invited me to have a nice day when I departed three minutes later. How in the hell can you possibly be expected to remain in a sour mood when you see people like that?

I guess I'll just have to be bitter about something else now. Like, perhaps, the first flurry of the season -- a clear sign that there's no turning back: winter's almost here and there's no turning back.

Aww damn it.