1. The parking garage at the bus station. If this were actually a blessings-counting kind of list I could have started with the same item. The parking at the bus station is free, which I very much appreciate. There is plenty of room in the garage, so I'm not going to gripe about how far from the bus bays I end up parking, because that is mostly a function of how early I get up and motivate myself out of the house. Mainly what gets on my nerves at the parking garage is the minority of other commuters who strike me as gobsmackingly inconsiderate. Special ill-will is reserved for the people who park their extremely large vehicles in the garage. Big SUVs and oversized pickup trucks bug me plenty when I have to share the road with them. They're bad for the environment, they're bad for our dependence on foreign oil, and most of all they're bad for me in the sense that if my little Mazda ever got into a collision with an Escalade, the driver who ended up with the corporeal consistency of housepaint would be me. But I generally try to tamp down my road rage by giving the other driver the benefit of the doubt. I envision the backstory in which they need such a monstrously oversized conveyance. Maybe they have four kids between the ages of 11 and 17. Maybe they have four large dogs in the same demographics. Maybe they work freelance construction and often haul sacks of Kwik-Krete hither and yon. However, none of those would seem to apply to someone who takes the bus to work every day, so anyone who drives a gas-guzzling, emissions-loopholing Ford F-350 back and forth to the bus station is really just a selfish asshole who enjoys being the biggest dick on the road. I have a recurring fantasy about developing the power of invisibility and hitting the bus station parking garage around midday armed with an invisible switchblade. Every SUV and truck would get a flat tire. Huge vehicles parked at the ends of rows, thus making it dangerous to turn corners because it is impossible to see around them, would get two flat tires. Hummers would get four flat tires because, seriously, fuck anybody who owns one of those abominations.
The other thing about the parking garage that irks me is people in normal-sized cars who back up the flow of traffic by making a hot mess of the simple act of pulling into a space, either because they screw up getting between the lines and have to back out and try again, or because they insist on doing a nine-point turn so they can back into a space. Urgh.
2. The Dulles Toll Road. There are actually six lanes of highway going east from the bus station to the Metro, two express lanes reserved for actual airport travelers (and, helpfully, buses) and four local lanes. One of the four local lanes is for High Occupancy Vehicles during rush hour (again, inculding buses). Sadly, the bus station sits to the right of the Toll Road, so the bus has to merge into the slow on/off lane, work its way across three more lanes to end up in the HOV, and then proceed in that lane until the next crossover point to the express airport lanes. Sometimes the merging is pretty arduous because other drivers on the Toll Road absolutely refuse to yield to the bus. Despite the fact that the bus probably has at least twice, maybe three times as much ability as a Toyota Tundra to re-paint the asphalt a lovely shade of Self-Absorbed Commuter Brains, I have yet to see a bus run over a car. I think the bus drivers are probably told their annual review might be negatively impacted by those kind of incidents. Also, sometimes reaching the HOV lane doesn't improve matters much because it's just as clogged as the other three lanes. Lest you think Northern Virginia is some kind of utopia for enlightened carpoolers, I hasten to add that this clogging is largely due to one guy alone in his car with a goddamn right to drive in the "fast" lane, hoping to see a cop before a cop sees him, at which point he'll change lanes. That guy times a hundred. The best (and by "best" I mean "holy Niflheim kill me now") is when there is a cop on the left shoulder and the other three lanes are slow and bumper-to-bumper but the HOV lane is at a dead stop because some solo-flying asshole is trying to merge to the right so he doesn't get a ticket and no one will let him in. All of the above are bad enough but it's the worst on very sunny days, especially sunny days in the winter when the sun is low and slanty and in everyone's eyes as we are all headed east. Because no one around here has figured out that wearing sunglasses can actually improve your ability to resist glare; they just figure they should squint and drive very slowly so as not to further anger the evil daystar.
Even reaching the express lanes is not always an off-to-the-races moment, because it's only two lanes and one bad accident ahead can jam up the works. I'll undercut my hateration again to relay one of the coolest things that ever happened on my commute. The set-up was the bad accident, trapping my bus at a halt on the express airport road. We sat there for a few minutes, as the four lane Toll Road traffic moved ironically briskly on the far side of a fairly wide grassy divide with a not insignificant culvert running down the middle. And I guess the bus driver decided enough was enough. He pulled the steering wheel hard a-starboard and drove the bus into the grassy divide. Commuter buses are not off-road vehicles by design, so we all felt every jolt of bouncing down one side of the culvert and roaring up the other, but as we nosed out way into the HOV lane and continued on our way no one was complaining. It was pretty rad.
3. Door blockers. The Orange Line of the Metro during rush hour is colloquially known as the Orange Crush. Not only are there not enough seats for all the riders, there's barely enough standing room for everyone, so there's actually some competition for more preferable places to stand. Middle of the aisles, with only overhead handholds, are the worst. Closer to the doors is better, as there are some floor-to-ceiling poles to hang on to. The truly cherry spots, if you have to stand, are right beside the doors, because in most cars there is some kind of wall perpendicular to the doors, which is convenient for leaning against while the train is in motion and bracing against when the train is jerkily coming to a stop. All perfectly understandable, but some infuriating people are so intent on staking a claim to those prime standing spots that it blows my mind.
One common offense is stepping onto the train and immediately stopping there by the door, even as people behind you are still trying to get on the train, when there is still a lot of open real estate further inside the car. You would think common courtesy would dictate that if you are getting on the train first (and sometmies, you are lucky to physically fit on the Orange Crush at all) you would proceed as far as you can to make things flow nicely. The spot by the door should be for the last person to get on. Common courtesy does not commute in and out of D.C. on the Metro.
Equally common, but more grievous in my book, is staying rooted to the spot by the door when the train arrives at subsequent stations. When each car is crammed with shoulder-to-shoulder commuters, there is a bit of slider-puzzle play at work at every stop. People who need to get off the train have to wriggle past others staying on the train. If you are standing right by the door, however, you can make everyone's life easier by taking ONE STEP onto the platform and not blocking the door as people de-train. One more step and you're back in your precious door-adjacent spot. The Hokey Pokey is more complicated, but people refuse to make even this measly concession to decency. They force people to contort around them. Come on, man.
4. Tourists in general. There's a million little things you pick up about the inner workings of the Metro system when you ride it every day. How to feed a Metro ticket through the turnstile reader without breaking stride. What the error messages on the turnstile reader mean and what to do when you get one. To stand to the right on the escalators so that people who want to walk them can do so on the left. I really shouldn't expect tourists to know any of these things because they don't ride the Metro every day, but gaaaaaahhh ... why would you schlep your family through any city's mass transit system during rush hour on a weekday? You want to match wits for several minutes with a magnetic-striped piece of paper and a bezel that has a diagram for lining up the magnetic strip RIGHT ON THERE? Fine, by all means, but if you don't want to get strangled by a messenger bag strap you should schedule those scintillatingly baffling minutes between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. KTHX!!! And when you get off the escalator, the best place to congregate and wait for the rest of your sightseeing group and figure out if you actually are on the right platform is anywhere else besides smack at the bottom of the escalator. And .. and ... numerous other annoyances.
Tourists who bring rolling suitcases the size of antique armoires onto the Orange Crush between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. shoot right past annoying me and into the zone where I wish painful death by fire ant swarms upon them.
5. McDonald's. Every morning for breakfast I have a cup of home-brewed coffee with skim milk and Splenda and a Fiber One bar, because as previously mentioned I do not want to weigh 300 pounds and/or have a heart attack. But my custom is at odds with my inclination, which leans heavily towards the hot breakfast sammich. I could probably go the rest of my life without another Big Mac or Chicken McNuggets or McFries or McShakes with only the slightest amounts of wist, but if I never had another Sausage McMuffin with Egg for the rest of my days I would pine for them like a consumptive poet. Just knowing that they exist in the world makes them a constant temptation. So, cruelly enough, when I finally get off the Metro every day and the only bit left is walking to my office, I have to walk past a McDonald's. It doesn't matter if I'm going to the corporate office in Crystal City or the government office in Rosslyn - a McD's lies in my direct path. And some mornings I am dead tired, and the way my maladaptive nervous system works, fatigue and hunger get conflated pretty easily. Walking past McDonald's and ignoring the siren SMcMw/E song (and smell) is a pretty grim way to finish up each commute.
Hey, that was fun. Maybe I'll do more "5 things" in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment