One of those days...
I took advantage of the "comp time for travel" policy that exists for folks like me who have to lose a weekend to be in place for a monday morning meeting and made a 5-day weekend out of Veteran's Day weekend. So, Wednesday was my first day back in the office. I thought I'd get ahead of the back-in-office tasks by getting in a little early. I thought wrong.
Things started to unravel just before I left the house, when a button on my suit jacket fell off when I looked at it. Easy fix, but still, kind of a bummer. I left the house early enough to have a few minutes to wait for the bus in the 34F weather. Long enough to appreciate the fact that my bus stop has a weather shelter and isn't just a pole with a sign mounted to it that tells the bus "stop here." The bus came on time, then got stuck in traffic. I mean "La Brea tar pits" stuck in DC traffic that would make purgatory seem like a good day at the DMV. I'm not sure where I was going with that, because I'm not sure which is worse, but you get the drift. So, after 60 minutes sitting on the bus to go less than 2 miles, we made it to the metro station.
As I stood up to exit the bus, a button on my peacoat popped off. Now, this particular button has been hanging on for months, but I respect its finely honed sense of comic timing to choose today of all days to finally release its tenuous grip on my jacket. Scooping up its mortal remains and unceremoniously dumping them into a pocket with the other button to get resewn at a later time, I stepped out of the bus door. Bus doors, which--in moment of undoubtedly divine intervention--decided to close on me. Hard. Fortunately, the remaining buttons on the coat held it together as I muscled my way through and made my way up to the metro platform.
And, as luck would have it, my train was just pulling into the station and I boarded without incident.
The moral, if there is one, is that it's better to be sitting on a bus that's stuck in traffic than to be waiting for one in the cold. Also, proper button maintenance is important.
Things started to unravel just before I left the house, when a button on my suit jacket fell off when I looked at it. Easy fix, but still, kind of a bummer. I left the house early enough to have a few minutes to wait for the bus in the 34F weather. Long enough to appreciate the fact that my bus stop has a weather shelter and isn't just a pole with a sign mounted to it that tells the bus "stop here." The bus came on time, then got stuck in traffic. I mean "La Brea tar pits" stuck in DC traffic that would make purgatory seem like a good day at the DMV. I'm not sure where I was going with that, because I'm not sure which is worse, but you get the drift. So, after 60 minutes sitting on the bus to go less than 2 miles, we made it to the metro station.
As I stood up to exit the bus, a button on my peacoat popped off. Now, this particular button has been hanging on for months, but I respect its finely honed sense of comic timing to choose today of all days to finally release its tenuous grip on my jacket. Scooping up its mortal remains and unceremoniously dumping them into a pocket with the other button to get resewn at a later time, I stepped out of the bus door. Bus doors, which--in moment of undoubtedly divine intervention--decided to close on me. Hard. Fortunately, the remaining buttons on the coat held it together as I muscled my way through and made my way up to the metro platform.
And, as luck would have it, my train was just pulling into the station and I boarded without incident.
The moral, if there is one, is that it's better to be sitting on a bus that's stuck in traffic than to be waiting for one in the cold. Also, proper button maintenance is important.
Some days it hardly seems worth it to do anything nice for yourself. I never get compensated for traveling on my days off for Monday morning starts. So I generally try to always take the following Monday of a holiday span off so I can actually treat the Sunday before as a play day. What's my company do? They announce that they will be trying to get customers to accept a Tuesday morning start on all such weeks. Which means I get to travel Friday evening or Saturday morning at the weekend. Bah!
ReplyDeleteI typically never schedule something for a Monday start unless I'm trying to fit in two places in the same week, and even then I aim to have Monday, Wednesday, and Friday be travel days. Which works in theory, but is severely restricted by airline schedules. I earn the comp time for those days that end up being like 18 hours long, so some part of that has me travelling outside my normal work hours. I'm not getting paid overtime, but I am getting some of that time back to take care of the chores and other stuff that I can't do at 30,000 ft.
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