Waiting for a break

Next week is Spring Break for the publics here. Being 44 and childless, it still has a very positive impact on me: no school buses for a week. One glorious week.

I hate school buses. I've probably hated them my whole life, but I never actually had to ride in one to school, so I don't recall any deep-seated negative trauma that may have resulted in my extreme dislike of them now. I only know this about them - they are always on my route to work, always just one step ahead of me, and always in my way.

When I'm working in Beaverton (the most difficult branch to get to despite the fact that I LIVE in Beaverton) I have no choice but to deal with them. I don't have a key to the branch so I have to leave at a time where I can avoid standing in the hallway, waiting for someone with a key to show up, for half an hour. In every other branch I can leave at like 6:45am, cruise unhindered to work, get in and get to work. In Beaverton, I have to leave the house at roughly 7:15 or so, hope for a decent line at the Starbucks drive in, and hopefully get to the building by around 7:50 or so - either someone is there by then or someone is on the way in very soon.

Leaving so late means I am on schedule with the schools. It's been a REALLY long time since I myself was in school, so I'm not even sure what time they start, but I think they stagger the times or something between grade, middle, and high school. Not for any logic that I can see beyond the maximum amount of school buses on the road.

There are all these crazy rules you have to abide when they are around you. Suddenly there's a bus stop on Murray, a five-lane road with a posted speed limit of 45 mph. If you see a bus up in front of you, you have to floor it (well, I do) to get around it because without fail there will be some hapless child standing on the side of the road, making it stop, making everyone coming and going around it stop, while the kid takes his time climbing onto the bus and slowly makes his way to the very last seat, when the driver finally is able to start driving again. It incenses me. I want to roll down the window and scream at the kid to step it up (but that would seem insensitive so I don't). On my Beaverton route, if I time it just a hair wrong, I am behind no less than five school buses and their stops. On mornings like those all I feel is despair.

Don't get me wrong, school buses are a necessary evil, I guess. Though when I was a kid I walked to school.. but there is one stretch of road I travel down where there are like three stops for the same bus. Three. All within seriously like a quarter of a mile. You can't walk a flipping quarter of a mile? Don't you think (like I obviously do) that this is catering to the little bastards a bit too much? And how I miss Mexico, where once you got on the bottom step of the bus with both feet the bus driver started moving again. School buses that wait until every child is seated are not preparing these children for the harsh realities of life - you gotta learn to walk on a moving bus sometime, it might as well be while you're still young and agile enough to survive a few headers.

I have to leave for work in about ten minutes now, so we'll see if I've timed it right. If not, then listen closely - those foul words muffled by closed windows are probably me.

Come on, Spring Break!