Stuck Bus Reserve

I'm on a bus that keeps breaking down

I’m working from a bus that keeps breaking down and pulling over to the side of the highway. The ride is pretty long; I’m heading to Syracuse (Nabhattan) from Manhattan. Nabeel is busy with some kind of duty, and that’s why I’m sending out Low Lift Ask twice in a row. There’s not too much information about what’s wrong with the bus, as of yet, but there’s an interesting dynamic occurring among the passengers.

There’s a woman a few rows ahead of me who has been loudly complaining and yelling on the phone about the whole situation, thereby receiving the ire of the other passengers more than the bus operator or company itself. I wish I could see into and understand her mind. She is an avatar of a particular type of person that seems to be peppered amongst the public. I wish to understand the particular topography of her mental information stream. I want to know why she thinks that loudly complaining to the bus driver about a situation that we’re all in will be useful to get us out of the situation more quickly. There is something fundamentally alien about her to me.

Maybe she has a different mental model of how the company works, or how the bus is being run, or what the protocols the driver might be subject to are. Maybe she’s had success, in the past, applying emotional pressure to particular weak points of a system of humans, thereby compelling them to accede to her desires. Maybe there’s something pathetic about me, unwilling to put myself into what feels like an uncomfortable emotional situation to rail against some kind of corporate entity, secure in my knowledge of the complexity of the system involved in getting us to this place, understanding I cannot rage against various private-equity-hollowed dark factories because it’s a pointless waste of my time on this earth. But clearly, the woman on the bus has lived 50-60 years with a completely different idea of what works and what doesn’t than I have. What does she know that I’m missing?

The bus driver made her apologize to everyone on the bus. She did so, then continued to grouse. Now we’re stopped at a highway rest stop in New Jersey, waiting for a backup bus. There’s a dude sitting near me with a t-shirt that says “I NEED A HUG FROM A BAD BITCH.” Me too, man, me too.

The driver, when pressed on what the issue is, keeps saying, “I could hit you with the terminology, but you won’t understand it if you’re not a bus person.” Spoken like someone who knows the terminology. Life is just grand sometimes!

Nabeel’s Footnote