Here I am yet again, sitting on my train, netbook in hand, enjoying my time. I don’t know about most people, but I figure the good majority don’t enjoy riding the train. Some times, riding the train is the high point of my day. On the train I can people watch, and there certainly are a bunch of crazies. The garden variety drunks and people who talk to themselves, all the way to the OCD folks that find it impossible to eat anything orange. Who decide to eat M&Ms. And are on the platform surrounded by discarded orange candies that they couldn’t bring themself to ingest. The train gives me plenty of time to do things that most normal people would have difficulty fitting into their day. Blogging perhaps. Without the train there is probably no way that I would have ever been able to read more than fifty books in one calendar year alone. That is more books than some people even read in their lifetimes.

On the other hand, buses I don’t really enjoy quite as much. Taking a shuttle bus is another portion of my commute to work, a portion I don’t discuss quite as much. The people on the bus pretty much are the same every day, which is good and bad. Good in that I have friends to ride with, but bad in the respect of people watching and catching a glimpse of some random amusing person that just happens to be on my train that day.

Over the past fifteen months or so since I started taking the bus, the number of bus passengers has increased steadily. Enough so we now require two buses, the original “Summit” bus, whose driver is a nice guy named Jose, and another new bus. We have different names for this second bus: the cocktail bus, due to the fact that in the front there is a table with cupholders, or my personal favorite, the robot bus. Robot bus, because the man that drives the bus has a very slow, slightly too loud monotone that he speaks in, prompting me to nickname him “The Robot.”
“HEL-LO. GOOD. MOR-NING. HAVE. A. NICE. DAY.”

Unfortunately it seems come the new year we will be getting a new, larger bus, instead of two smaller buses. This is unfortunate because it means we will go back to having only one driver. And it appears that the driver is not going to be Jose. It will probably end up being the Robot Man. And this is despite the fact that most people prefer Jose, in fact my friends will wait for Jose if he is not the first bus to arrive. And he gets you to the train station on time. Not to say he drives too fast, but he doesn’t take the most roundabout and slow way of getting to the station that the Robot does. Plus Jose is always kind, for example, in the rain or a bad storm instead of dropping us off at the “designated bus stop” he drives us right up to our buildings. True, these are simple things, but he is a good guy. We asked Jose was going to happen with him, and he said he would probably get stuck driving a bus route in Connecticut instead, and that he really isn’t too keen on that. Anyways, Jose, you will be missed.