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davidnMy love affair with the CT2 was all too brief, as after a very good start I've discovered that, like everything run by the MBTA, it is completely awful. Rather than sticking to any sort of prearranged schedule, the best way for the online time chart to describe it would be just to say it comes "when it feels like it", and sometimes not at all - twice since I confidently switched to it, a bus has failed to arrive because of having broken down at some point along its route, and when there's only meant to be one every half hour anyway, that's fairly deadly to reliability. To make up for that, sometimes two buses going in the same direction (opposite from the one that I'm going in) will arrive together, and they'll turn one around to go back the way - without changing any of the signs, that is, so when you get on one of them you always have to disregard where it says it's going and ask the driver which side of the river they're planning on taking you to.
According to the almost entirely fictional timetable I have two choices of which one to attempt to catch in the evenings - one of them if I remember to leave the office a few minutes early and one if I don't. The earlier one, which I got the very first time and is run by a man who drives like his trousers are full of bees, actually has a fairly decent on-time record and gets to the other end in ten minutes. Most of the other drivers don't feel quite the same urgency (though they're more likely to get you there alive) - one evening one of them politely trundled behind a woman pushing a shopping trolley down the middle of the road for half a street before she finally got out of the way. It can only be for this reason that some of them manage to become twenty minutes late after going only two stops from the first station to where I catch it - the first time that happened, I remember saying that there was no way to achieve that unless the driver actually had to stop and ask for directions.
Something which was to become surprisingly real today. When I got on the bus this morning, which was ten minutes late, the driver announced that she hadn't been on this route before, and during the journey called over her shoulder to the passengers when encountering junctions to ask which direction to turn. I was up at the front eventually and half wondering if I should tell her to get in the back and let me drive instead. Fairly surprised that anyone could hand someone a bus and not tell them what to do with it, I asked her what had happened when we arrived, and she showed me that she had been given notes for the wrong route.
Sometimes it's surprising that I ever manage to get to work at all. At least I'm never trapped underground any more.
According to the almost entirely fictional timetable I have two choices of which one to attempt to catch in the evenings - one of them if I remember to leave the office a few minutes early and one if I don't. The earlier one, which I got the very first time and is run by a man who drives like his trousers are full of bees, actually has a fairly decent on-time record and gets to the other end in ten minutes. Most of the other drivers don't feel quite the same urgency (though they're more likely to get you there alive) - one evening one of them politely trundled behind a woman pushing a shopping trolley down the middle of the road for half a street before she finally got out of the way. It can only be for this reason that some of them manage to become twenty minutes late after going only two stops from the first station to where I catch it - the first time that happened, I remember saying that there was no way to achieve that unless the driver actually had to stop and ask for directions.
Something which was to become surprisingly real today. When I got on the bus this morning, which was ten minutes late, the driver announced that she hadn't been on this route before, and during the journey called over her shoulder to the passengers when encountering junctions to ask which direction to turn. I was up at the front eventually and half wondering if I should tell her to get in the back and let me drive instead. Fairly surprised that anyone could hand someone a bus and not tell them what to do with it, I asked her what had happened when we arrived, and she showed me that she had been given notes for the wrong route.
Sometimes it's surprising that I ever manage to get to work at all. At least I'm never trapped underground any more.
