Journal Entry #9

I will be the first to say how much I love living in the city. Born and raised amid the noise, the smells, the incredibly proud sports fans, my city is one of those places where I feel like I can go walk around and just watch the world.
But there are certain aspects of city-living that do rub me the wrong way.
I'm sure most of you have ridden a bus at some point in your life, school bus, city bus, trolley, they go along the streets to get you from point A to point G with brief stops at points B-C-D-E-F along the way. But the only thing the public has to go on about the buses is these little things called bus schedules. You know. Those references for when a specific bus will be at a specific location at a specific time. These schedules which are gloriously made available to the public serve as the only guide if people want to get to work but must coordinate the rest of their day around hen they have to catch the bus. So it comes as a nasty surprise when, occasionally, that specific bus is not where the schedule says it should be.
Yes, I know I sound like Amy Adams in Leap Year where everything has to happen on time or the world as we know it will end, but hear me out for a sec.
I received a call from my boss earlier today saying someone had called off and asked if I could cover for them. I told him I didn't have a car but that I could catch a bus at 1:00. 12:40 rolls around and I make my way to the bus stop, because I know from experience that the bus can sometimes arrive a whole ten minutes early. I like to give myself a large margin for error. But as I'm standing up there, the same two buses pass me twice on their route and I was just about go home or start walking to work when, lo and behold, my bus rolls onto my street twenty minutes late. I say again: twenty minutes late! If I were working full-time or even part-time instead of seasonal, that would be a write-up. Is this a problem anywhere else? Were school buses this unreliable? Because I know several people who depend on the bus system to get to and from work, and I'd be more than a little dubious if I had to constantly worry about whether I'm going to be late for work.
I've been riding the bus for a while, and it didn't take me long to realize that the time given on the bus schedule should include a ten minute fudge factor, but twenty minutes? To me that sounds like either laziness, incompetence, or negligence.

-Grace