ANOTHER ONE RIDES THE BUS

A rough timeline of my Saturday afternoon trip to Franklin Park Mall this past weekend to get a card and a gift for my karaoke buddy Noel's birthday.

12:00--I leave the house to catch the 32. It's several minutes late, but on a warm spring weekend that's to be expected.

12:30--I'm at the 12:20 lineup downtown. I go to get on the 2, but it looks a bit crowded, so I opt to go look for the 22. Once at the 22's block, I overhear a driver telling another passenger that the 22 broke down on the way downtown, so it's running even later than the rest of the fleet. I momentarily consider going back to the 2, but they break the lineup without the 22. Since I have time to kill and about a week's worth of newspapers to read, I decide to wait for the 22.

1:00--Noel calls from the library. If I'd remembered he was going to be over there I'd have gone over to hang with him for a bit and escape the 90-degree heat. No sign of the 22 yet.

1:30--I've been sitting in hot, humid, downtown Toledo for an hour with nothing to do but read the paper. Still no 22. I've gotten through about 2 days of papers waiting. A few minutes later, buses start arriving for the 1:30 lineup. The 22 finally shows up around 1:40. The lineup breaks around 1:45

2:15--I'm on the 22, arriving at Westgate. Once there, I get a bad feeling. When we start heading back toward Secor and Central, I realize it's a good thing I have so much paper to read and time to kill. I forgot the 22 doesn't continue on to FPM on weekends. Now I have to ride back downtown for the so-called "2:40" lineup.

3:00--I'm at the 2:40 lineup, finally on the 2, waiting to leave. Lineup breaks about 3:05.

3:10--On the 2, at Monroe and Collingwood. The bus has started to make an extremely loud beeping noise and has stalled out. The driver tries a couple of times to start it back up, but each time the beeping noise will not shut off.

3:20--By this time my fellow riders don't care if the damn thing keeps beeping, as long as it runs. Let's just get to where the heck we're going. The driver has radioed in for another bus, which will meet us at Monroe and Detroit.

3:25--We get to Monroe and Detroit, and proceed to wait for the other bus.

3:30--The other bus arrives. We make the switch and get back underway.

3:45--Somewhere around Monroe and Secor, the bus stalls out. After a minute it refires. Thankfully there's no beeping. Yet.

4:00--A full FOUR HOURS after leaving the house, I finally arrive at the mall. As I deboard the bus starts beeping. Poor driver. I text my pal Max, a TARTA savant, to tell him of my misadventures. He's too busy to talk, so rather than TM the whole story I wait until later when he's got a minute.

4:20--It's 4:20, so natch I go smoke a doob in the restroom. Just kidding. But with the day I've had up to that point, I probably could've used it!

4:25--I've gotten what I went there for in the first place (I'll tell you at the end), so I hit the food court to relax, have a bite, and do the crosswords and other puzzles I've saved from all the papers I've read through.

5:45--I head back out to the bus stop, find a shady spot to sit and wait and read more paper. Did I mention it was a 90-degree day?

6:00--Bus arrives. Same driver. Not sure if it's the same bus or not but all seems to be working well. We head downtown for the "6:10" lineup.

6:20--My eyes are tired from all the reading, so I decide to go ahead and send Max a series of TMs describing my day spent in the TARTA Twilight Zone. He can only laugh in repsonse, and I don't blame him. I kept laughing at my predicament throughout. Little did I know there was a Part Two coming, and it would not be as funny...

6:25--Monroe and Detroit. Bus starts making a slightly different beeping noise. Some of my fellow riders and I begin having flashbacks. It's not as loud this time and we're still moving, so we should be okay.

6:30--We're just about to pass the former Macomber (aka Make-'Em-Dumber) HS, a mere 2 or 3 minutes, mind you, from arriving at the lineup, when the driver tells us that the order has been given to break the lineup without us. The bus erupts in protest, but it's not our driver's fault. As we continue down Monroe, I can see all the way to Summit, where sure enough I can see some of the buses heading away from downtown, including my 32. The lineups have already been ridiculously late all day, would another 2 minutes have killed anyone? Whoever the dispatcher was who made this call ought to be horsewhipped. (And I had a bus full of volunteers.) The whole time I continue to TM Max, who started laughing at me even more at this point. Fucker.

6:33--Rather than sit downtown in the heat for an hour (as I had done once already), several of us decided to stay on the bus as she ran her 17 route, which she promised was shorter so we wouldn't miss the next lineup.

6:45--I have no choice but to regale my fellow riders with my tale of woe, just so they know that no matter how insane their day has now become, mine has been more so.

7:00--It was somewhere around this time that I really started to miss having my own wheels. Only natch...here I am, joyriding around, killing time, enjoying the AC, avoiding the heat...exactly what I'd be doing at that time on a day like this if I had wheels.

7:55--So after my leisurely 17 ride, and another late lineup, I am back on the 32 and in the homestretch. Noel calls to confirm picking me up for karaoke. "Buddy, have I got a story to tell you on the way!"

8:00--Back home at last. Never could I have imagined it would take me EIGHT HOURS to go across town to the mall and back. I could have hopped a Greyhound and gone to visit Willie in South Bend and gotten back sooner!