Route 55: Rockville Station to ???

Since I have no car, I have to ride the bus to work every morning. Pretty decent county-wide bus, although I hate how it takes me like an hour and a half to get to work when the ride would be at the most five to ten minutes if I were driving there myself. But, beside the point.

I tend to be a bit tired in the morning. Sometimes when taking the Ride On 55 north to work I would drift off for a couple of seconds. One day, I was asleep for a full several minutes. I woke up well before I needed to get off, so there was no problem. So, when I got to work, I mentioned at lunch time to my coworkers that I had fallen asleep on bus that morning. I said the same when I got home that evening to my grandmother.

And from both coworkers and Grandma I got the same, standard, dumbass comment…

“Oh, no! If you fall asleep on the bus, you don’t know where you might end up!”

To both I just flatly replied: “I’d end up in Germantown, where I’d just get on the 55 going back toward Rockville, and I’d make sure I’m awake for my stop this time.”

In other words, don’t give me this “you never know where you’ll end up” nonsense. If this were some interdimensional, intergalactic time-traveling bus that only goes around once every fifty years, yeah, I could see not knowing where the hell I’d end up if I were to fall asleep. Although, now that I mention it, why the hell would an interdimensional, intergalactic time-traveling bus be so mundane that I’d fall asleep while riding it rather than, you know, watching where it’s going and wondering who slipped some drugs into my Vanilla Coke?

Yeah, it’s a run of the mill Ride-On bus. It has a set route, set schedule, set everything. Even the drivers have a set task of, when they reach the end of the line, they spot check the bus for any stray bags, coats, or napping riders. They would wake the napping riders and say “End of the line”. If that bus was to be no longer in service, they’d say “Get off”. If to stay the same route and just go back the other direction or switch to different route, you could stay on. Since the driver woke the rider, rider could just ask if this bus or a different one is going back the other way. Seeing as, if I had slept all the way to the end of the line, it was like 8:30 in the morning anyway, a good 16 hours before that bus would stop running, I could just hop on the 55 to Rockville, for which I would not have to wait any more than 20 minutes, get off at my stop, and not be more than about 10 or 20 minutes or so late to work.

So, had I fallen asleep on the bus, I know where I’d end up. A magical mystical place called Germantown, Maryland. My ass, I grew up in Germantown, magical and mystical it ain’t! Unless magical and mystical is how you describe runaway development. Hehehe.

I might add that anyone who actually does get lost riding the bus is a fucking idiot. Seriously, do you just hop on a random bus without checking its time tables or at least that it goes where you’re trying to get to? Are you aware you’ve hopped on a bus that only goes this one direction for three hours on weekday afternoons? Did you realize this bus goes nowhere fucking near the Silver Spring metro station? Although I give some leeway to those who heeded false information from bus drivers themselves. There was a time I was riding Route 46 on Rockville Pike, and the driver advised someone who was just getting on that, to hop on the Route 38, just get off at the Twinbrook station. I waited for the person to sit down when I leaned toward her and said “Stay on here until White Flint, rather. Route 38 doesn’t go to Twinbrook.” Sigh. Just think. She’d have been waiting at Twinbrook for a long time. Of course, she was about to be waiting at White Flint for a long time, too, because the 38 is one of these piece of shit buses that only goes by once every half an hour, and often skips runs, but that’s a different rant entirely for another time.

But even if you didn’t fucking bother to check a bus map or time table, you can’t get lost on this bus system or any bus system for that matter. You’ll be able to find your way back, even if it takes a while. Which, as already mentioned, can be totally avoided if you use that big squishy organ encased in your skull between your ears. Although, you’re shit out of luck if you decided to go traipsing around on strange buses late at night when they stop running for the night or if you hopped a rush hour only bus that dumped you off in Damascus. Either way, the bus won’t dump you off in the middle of a desert somewhere, not far from Area 51-A, leaving you thinking that you should have got off at Crackton.

So, please, don’t go seriously thinking I’ll get lost on a bus I take every single day, that runs back and forth all day every 20 minutes, and that I know like the back of my own hand. Come on.