Good or bad, it appears that luck seems to run in batches, case in point, the 18 hour period between Monday evening and Tuesday morning. On Monday, around 6pm I decided to leave work and go home and have dinner. I stood the bus stop, like I’ve done a million times and waited for my bus. The bus appeared at the intersection, then promptly turned left and headed off, much to the surprise of several people waiting with me.
I had several other options available to me, I could take the TrainBus, the Skytrain, or just wait for the next bus which would arrive 30 minutes later (but who knows where it would be along the route). Instead, I said screw it, I’m gonna have dinner downtown. It probably wasn’t the smartest choice but I decided to try the two taco combo deal at Taco Time even though it’s by far the worst Mexican fast food place out there. I specifically asked for crisp shell tacos because soft shell tacos don’t do it for me. Since I was so close to work, I headed back there where a few of my co-workers were still left.
Sitting down at my desk, I unwrapped my tacos to find soft shell ones. WTF?!? How hard is it to get that right? It’s 50-50! Either you make crisp shell or soft ones. I rolled the taco dice and came up snake eyes. I decided to try them anyways since I didn’t want to go back. The soft shell flour tortillas were awful and too chewy for my liking. I ate half of one and then gave the other one to a homeless person. My mexifries were quite tasty but that ain’t real dinner. The only silver lining to the evening was that I fixed a major crash bug before leaving work. Not wanting to chance the random bus route, I took the TrainBus home instead, where I’m pretty sure I snored while I slept.
Thinking my not-so-perfect evening was behind me, I went to bed extra early because I had a team-wide programmer meeting at 10am sharp the next day. I woke up real early this morning and was off with enough time to get to the studio well before 10am. As I got on the Skytrain at Lougheed, it began to pull away when the public address system squawked to life. Apparently, a police incident had closed Broadway station on the Expo line. I was on the Millenium line so I could still get to Commercial but there was no transferring to the Expo line there as the trains were just going straight through. I was metaphorically rammed up the ass since I had no option available to me that would get me to work on time. Two of my best choices were to either get off the train, back track to Columbia, and then ride the Expo line but that would make me late and move me in the opposite direction for at least 15 minutes. My second option was to keep going, hoping that the station would be open while I was enroute. If it wasn’t then I would just take the 99B and then catch a bus downtown at Granville.
When I arrived at Commercial, the police were still keeping the Broadway station roped off, so I waited two minutes for a 99B bus. I got on and sat down. Just as the bus pulled away, I saw the Skytrain attendants ripup the yellow crime scene tape and roll up the gates to let people back into the station. If I had just waited 15 seconds to board the bus, I would have been back on schedule. As it were, I remained on the 99B.
I wound up being over 25 minutes late and missing the meeting completely. Yay!