Metro Opens Doors

Ah, good old Metro. You never know what the day will bring. Your bus may have a delay, you might be exposed to viral meningitis. You just never know. Unlike the entitled bourgeoisie of MD and VA, we DC-bred kids didn't have a yellow stretch limo come take us to school everyday. Well, that's not fair to MD and VA kids, they didn't get dropped off everyday. Whenever the wind would blow too hard, their school would be closed while we'd still be standing outside in the cold waiting for the Amistad bus to shuttle us across the city like some type of modern-day Middle Passage.

This might be going off on a tangent, but there's a reason that so many people from DC take offense when people use "DC" as a blanket term for where they're from instead of just saying they're from Maryland or Virginia. The lack of a school bus to take you to and from school everyday is part of that reason. I hold no animosity toward the good folks from PG County. Some of my best friends are from PG (haha). The fact remains however, that being from MD or VA means that you didn't have to wake up on a zero degree day and look at sixteen feet of snow piled up to your third floor window and then turn on the TV and wait for the words to scroll across the bottom of the screen as slow as humanly possible (and in no logical order): Federal Gov't Closed, Anne Arundel County Closed, PG County Closed, Loudon County Closed, Hell Closed, Antarctica Closed, Winter Closed, DC Public Schools Open On Time.

I remember the Metrobus electric sliding across the 11th Street Bridge and me making sure I was sitting next to one of those emergency windows with the red latch release lever in case we ended up in the river or, if I wasn't, trying to read the emergency instructions on the little hatch on the ceiling. So yeah...you my good Temple Hills friend are from PG...not DC.

Anyway, getting back to my original point: The metrobus is full of wonder so I'm not surprised at the news over the last two weeks about the driver who had meningitis, the 90 or so buses they had to take offline due to them randomly bursting into flames nor the bus driver who got in a fistfight with a passenger over a fare dispute. I've seen bus drivers kicked, spit on, beat up and actually was on a 32 bus when someone started shooting at the bus driver when he pulled up to the stop.

Metroopensdoors