I'm so excited!

Tomorrow, I'm gonna go pick up my miserable Swedish turbo eating seven-forty. It's been sitting in the mechanic's side yard while mysterious doo-dads were created in the frozen tundra of the Viking nation and then shipped across the wastes of the North Atlantic. It's been sitting at the shop getting a new Turbo put into her gizzard. I've been sneaking in to work via the bus system for the last week... interesting. I suppose that's the best way to describe it... interesting.

I've been thinking about it for the last couple of days: riding the bus has been a leveling experience for the arrogant Bob. I got up early, hit the shower, then went and stood beside the sign in front of the auto parts house out on Colonial Drive, then put my buck and a quarter into the talking exact change money collector so that I could get downtown, then used the free transfer to travel down Central Blvd... right in the middle of the 'hood... the JAC... the worksite... and then at the end of the day reverse the process to get back to point A. Plan ahead, Bob. I got a sandwich from Publix and took it with me each day so that I could eat at my desk.

Lessons:

1. If you're a part of the Lynx family you have to plan carefully or you won't get any lunch or a transfer for the secondary ride.

2. If you take the bus to work you have to leave early and wait in crowds of other working stiffs for the electric blue painted bus, complete with Transit Television Network ads featuring Ron Popiel and his amazing rotory cookers (only four easy payments of blablabla). Actually, the folks that I was riding with were OK... those are the people who actually have jobs, are sober and employed, even if they are trapped in dead end jobs.

3. The problem comes in the company that you wait with, guys who are hiding in the kiosks to stay out of the chill wind but don't have the 5 quarters that represent a ride... the bums in Orlando all seem to live in the bus kiosks where they share their tuberculosis with anyone who wants to stand beside the Lynx sign waiting for the ride. Yikes! Great wracking gobs of green phlegm...coughs of black tubercular death on the cold hopeless streets that keep ringing echoes of Cormac McCarthy novels and George Grosz pictures of a filthy and decadent graveyard of failure and death.

4. Most of my fellow riders are tired to the point of nodding off when they are wending their way home at dark thirty. I typically work a 10 hour day, but I sit at a desk in an air conditioned office and flog a computer all day. I'm brain tired by 6 or 7 but not bone tired like these folks. I absolutely don't want to trade places. You can have the minimum wage. Anybody who thinks that this is fun are nuts.

5. All that aside, the bus is a great way to move around. My fellow riders were invariably polite, helpful, patient, accepting, and most expecially CIVIL... all the things that seem to be lacking in other venues.

Anyhow, I'm getting back the Swedish harpie in the morrow. She has a new turbo and can go back to the task of hauling my tail around O-town. But I'll probably stay in touch with Link 28 inbound and Link 4 outbound. It's kind of nice to know that I can get to work even if I don't have a sled. The car is nice because it represents freedom and is a badge of middle class-ness. Now I understand why high school kids lust for their own cars. Tomorrow will be Volvo time! Beer for everybody!

Bob