The first morning bus commute

Ironically, after my first day at mSpoke, the weather got bad enough that I (and most everyone else) worked from home on Tuesday and Wednesday. Since I drove to work on Monday, today was my first day taking the bus to work in the morning.

Before I get to that, though, I just have to say yet again how amazing dogs are. Lubov somehow knew that I was leaving for work today, well before I had done anything that I thought might give it away. He moped around all morning and kept giving me that “I know something different is about to happen and I know I won’t like it” look. Argue all you want, but you’ll never convince me they don’t know.

Anyway, thanks to Google Transit (and no thanks to the dreadful Port Authority website) I found a bus that stops at a reasonable time just a 5 minute walk from the house. So, armed with a book, laptop, and several podcasts (NPR’s daily 5 minute news segment, Fresh Air, and Ancient Faith Radio’s The Path by Fr. Tom Soroka), I comforted the pups and headed out.

It was so cold out again, that when I decided to use my phone (which had been in my pocket and reasonably warm, so I thought) to check Gmail at the bus stop, it wouldn’t even acknowledge that my sim card existed, and rebooted itself repeatedly. It probably needed more coffee, like me. It also took 15 minutes on the bus for my iPod to warm up enough to work at all, and my toes never quite warmed up until lunch time.

I’m all thawed out now, so I can say that I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly the bus got me downtown. I had a few minutes to spare, so I even made a detour over to the Port Authority store (or whatever you call it, it’s not a terminal) and bought weekly bus passes for the remainder of February. I still managed to make it into the office by 9.

So far so good with the bus. Hopefully the journey home will be equally painless. Thank you PAT bus 1B, and thanks Google Transit.