A Better Title

Apologies for the lack of updates for the past few days. I just didn’t really have the mood to blog.

Anyway, I missed my bus by half a minute this morning, so I had to take a cab to work and bid goodbye to 1.5 hours of pay. It isn’t the first time I almost miss or actually miss my bus.

Sometimes it is my fault (“oh, I still have 3 minutes left the last time I checked, let’s just take a leisurely wa… oh foot, that’s the bus!” *runs to catch the bus*), but sometimes it’s iris’s (“oh I still have 15 minutes to get to the bus stop, now let me just refresh the pa… oh foot, I only have 2 minutes!” *runs out of house*).

In the former case, sometimes I see the bus pulling away without me at the bus stop, in which case I know I’ll have to wait for about half an hour for the next bus. In the latter case, usually I don’t even get to see the bus at all. The only indication that I’ve missed the bus is iris saying that the next bus is coming in half an hour’s time.

Rather than waiting for the next bus and be extremely late, I usually choose to take a cab instead. When I have flagged a cab, boarded it, and told the driver my destination, a few things can happen.

The first is the driver beating me up to death.

The first is the cab overtaking the bus along the way to the expressway. This means that I’ve just missed the bus by a few seconds. I know I could have just told the driver to drop me at the next bus stop, but I’ll feel bad giving the driver a false hope of earning my 1.5 hours of pay. So usually I just pretend I don’t see the bus at all and carry on to my workplace.

The second is the cab overtaking the bus on the expressway. This means that the bus has left the bus stop quite some time before I reached. Since it is an express bus, the next stop would have been somewhere near my workplace, so usually I’ll just carry on to my workplace.

The third is the cab doesn’t overtake the bus at all until I’ve reached my workplace. In which case I’ll call 999 for investigation of possible alien abduction.

So I thought that this cannot go on all the time. I have to come up with a strategy in order to waste only as little money as possible. Here’s how it roughly goes:

1. Check iris at home and leave the house at least 10 minutes before the predicted or scheduled arrival, whichever is earlier. Really, this is the easiest way not to miss the bus, but knowing myself, I doubt this can happen all the time.
2. Check mobile iris when I’m walking to the bus stop.
3. If by the time I reach the bus stop, the predicted arrival of the next bus is still within the next 10 minutes or Arriving, then I haven’t missed the bus.
4. If along the way, the predicted arrival of the next bus changes from Arriving to half an hour, it means I’ve missed the bus.
5. If I can get a cab within 3 minutes after missing the bus, I’ll ask the driver to go to the last bus stop just before the expressway.
   • If I overtake the bus before reaching the bus stop, I’ll alight at the bus stop and flag the bus there.
   • If I don’t overtake the bus before reaching the bus stop, it means the bus has entered the expressway, and so I’ll ask the driver to take me to my workplace instead.
6. If I can’t get a cab within 3 minutes of missing the bus, I’ll ask the driver to take me directly to the work place.

Let’s hope that this strategy will solve my problem, and at the same time save me as much money as possible.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 10:21 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.