Tag: Public Transport

A number of dull anecdotes from my first week back at work…

Anecdote 1: From the bus to work on Thursday morning I saw a 28. Not the number, the bird. The reason this is worthy of blogging is that – despite the fact that they were all over the place when I was a kid – I hardly ever see them these days.

(When I say they were all over the place I mean it. Once one flew into the church on a Sunday morning when I was about 10, and sat flapping its wings and screeching on top of the crucifix all through mass. The priest was moved to comment that if it got too close to him it’d be a 14 – which I thought terribly unchristian of him :))

I blame the rainbow lorikeets.

These gaudy and raucous birds escaped from UWA in the 1960s (why there were any there to begin with I have no idea) and have been spreading ever since, cutting into the territory of the 28s. If I had my way they’d be wiped out with extreme prejudice, but (apparently because they’re colourful) people seem to like having them around, rather than the “dull” 28. So I suppose I’ll have to get used to them. But I’ll still keep a look out for the occasional brave 28 holding out against the rainbow aggressor!

Anecdote 2: Only a little bit further down Nicolson Road the bus got stuck behind an ambulance. Well not behind the ambulance – at right angles to the ambulance which was parked just off the roundabout with Derby road, in such a fashion that it made it impossible for the bus to turn left (which it needed to do). The Ambos were seeing to a cyclist who’d apparently been knocked off his bike and either broken or dislocated his shoulder, and seemed oddly inclined to leave him for a few seconds to move their vehicle 20 metres further down the street.

The result was that the bus was stuck at the roundabout – completely blocking the street – for a good twenty minutes. Cars started banking up behind us, and about ten minutes in frustrated motorists started driving down the wrong side of the street just to get past. This led to a quite amusing incident where one came face to face with another bus coming around the right way and had drive up onto the pavement to let it through.

Personally I don’t know why our bus driver didn’t carry on straight, if only far enough to clear the roundabout. But he apparently preferred to sit tight and cause chaos. Perhaps independent thinking had been drummed out of him by harsh Transperth discipline? In any case the cyclist was eventually loaded into the ambulance and driven away, and we carried on, twenty minutes late.

Anecdote 3: On the train home that same day I ran into Lyndah. Or rather I saw her. She either didn’t see me, or decided to ignore me – which is fine. She and my brother seem to have had some kind of falling out, and my mad crush on her pretty much faded away once I went public about it on this very blog. She’s still very pretty (although she did look rather tired), but I no longer turn into a babbling fool in her presence 🙂

Anecdote 4: On the train home today there was a girl who bore an astounding resemblance to my ex-collegue Sam. Her hair was brown instead of scarlet, her face was more rounded and she had fewer ear piercings, but apart from that they could have been twins. Very strange – I wondered momentarily if I’d fallen into some kind of alternate universe.

So that was my week. Amazing!