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Unrealistic Expectations

I found myself lecturing a whole bus full of people on the subject of unrealistic expectations the other night. Not what I’d planned and not one of my best moments but these things happen. What can you do?  Life is to be lived and it’s unscripted. Sometimes you have to speak up and try to electrify the somnambulant moment with a few choice words.

Let me explain. I was trying to get down town. I had tickets for a lecture by Richard Dawkins. It began at 6pm so by the time I finished work at 4.30pm in La Jolla I had no time to waste. With the unpredictable Friday traffic and parking I figured my best option was to take the bus. The Downtown Express leaves campus at 4.39pm and the schedule promised a downtown arrival by 5:17pm via a brief stop at the Old Town Transit Terminal.  It sounded perfect but the Padres were playing the Dodgers in the season opener at Petco Park and it was also Good Friday so there could be a cruise ship or aircraft carrier at the port so I suspected it might be a little tight.

The bus arrived on schedule and I was surprised to find the freeway pretty clear. In no time at all I was lifting my eyes out my book to gaze at the sparkling water and palm trees of Mission Bay. It was ten to five, ‘Great’, I thought, ‘I might even be able to squeeze in a quick pint in the Ulysses Grant.’

I realize now this was an unrealistic expectation. Public travel is often hindered for no good reason by the public. Every bus or train around the world usually contains at least one mad person and at least one dangerous idiot. I don’t know why this is, it might be a ploy by automobile companies to ensure solo car use, it might be a Federal requirement or it might just be the statistical social odds, whatever it is the ‘public’ part of ‘public travel’ often gets in the way and causes delays.

Recently, I was held up by an obese lady on a motorized scooter who was too heavy for the hydraulic lift used to carry disabled people on board. I had to wait for twenty minutes while she was raised up and down a half a foot while the driver tried to make it work. In the end she got off the scooter and gingerly climbed onto the bus through the front doors like the rest of us. The lift was fine bringing the bike on board without her.

Several times in London I’ve missed appointments because of suicides on the tube. The train would stop and word would arrive of a jumper on the track at Waterloo or Kentish town. There would be a group sigh and 1.2 seconds of socially permitted passenger interaction involving no more than eye rolling before the shutters of English stoic etiquette encased us all again in silence. Sometimes there would be an electronic map available showing the hold up spread around the whole tube system in flashing red. It was hard not imagine the red as the suicide’s blood flowing on the tracks, filling up the deep underground veins of London from St. Pancreas to Shepherd’s Bush. 

We pulled into Old Town and fell back into my book. I was reading, ‘The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner’ by James Hogg. It’s a gothic crime story from 1824, at its core is a fascinating study of religious fanaticism. It reminds me a lot of Crime and Punishment but with the added kick of being set in Edinburgh. I became consumed by a wonderful description of the justified sinner harassing his estranged elder brother at a tennis game and so it took a while for me to realize, as I turned page after page, that the bus had not been moving for some time. I looked at my watch. Somehow it was already 5.15pm, the time we supposed to be in the Gas Lamp District, and we were still in Old Town and the driver had turned off the engine.

There was a young man talking to the driver at the front of the bus. Some other passengers were slowly getting off with confusion on their faces. There had been no announcement. I went to the driver and asked her what the hold up was.

‘We’re waiting for the police,’ she said. ‘The woman in the purple hat hit him on the head with her bag.’

The young man had a sulky look on his face.

‘Are you ok?’ I asked.

‘Yes’ he said.

I looked around the bus for the woman in the purple hat. There was nobody that fit the description.‘So where is she?’

The driver pointed off across the station towards the metro stop. It was busy. The woman in the purple hat was long gone.

‘It looks like she got away,’ I said. ‘Maybe you should get off the bus and wait for the police and then we can continue downtown.’ The boy shook his head.

The driver spoke up, ‘I’ve been told to wait here until the police arrive.’

Amazing. I was stunned. There’d been a minor incident with what sounded like an unstable woman and now a whole bus full of people and countless others waiting down town were going to be held up for an indefinite period of time while a young man tried to get his pound of flesh for a blow to the head I could only deduce amounted to a cuff.

‘You do realize they could be hours?’ I said. The driver shrugged. People behind me asked what was going on. The young man, who was about eighteen or nineteen didn’t respond.

‘I don’t think you’ve had much experience of the police,’ I said. ‘But trust me on this. This is not going to be a high priority for them. They are not going to set up an incident room with a team of detectives…’

‘What’s going on?’ shouted someone from the back of the bus. It was then that I spoke to everyone, filling them in on the situation.

I can’t remember exactly what I said but I think I referred to the boy as ‘naïve’ and explained how we had to sit here until he had a learning moment with the police and realized he was not in an episode of CSI. I asked a couple of passengers who’d sat near to the boy what they’d seen and the incident had been so fleeting it had barely been noticed by anyone other than the victim. So, pontificating like Ignatius Reilly from ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ I expounded that the police are at best a social ideal and that reality renders them out numbered, under funded and riddled with the bitter and incompetent just like any large bureaucracy… At one point I also changed tack and tried to suggest the driver should speedily take the boy to the nearest hospital to have him checked for concussion…

I don’t know what I was hoping to accomplish exactly. I think I hoped to get the boy to step off the bus and have the driver continue the route. It didn’t work and I kind of knew I would fail but I felt like I had to try. At twenty to six the next bus arrived and I boarded it with the rest of the passengers, leaving the young man and the driver alone on the other bus waiting for justice to arrive with all lights flashing.

I was late to the lecture but as luck would have it I didn’t miss a thing, since the start was delayed by protestors from the cult of Christ getting in the way and trying to engage everyone with their wacky ideas of a three-tiered universe and the ‘blood of the lamb’ washing away ‘our sins’ etc etc.

My unrealistic expectations, the young man’s unrealistic expectations and the Jesus freaks unrealistic expectations all kind of balanced out for me at the end like the cozy and lazy ending to a bad TV show or blog post.