Sometimes it is just better to remain in "ignorance" than to know the awful truth

 

The insanity of politics aside, the mundane vagaries of real life for real people continues as always. There are times when you wish you knew less than you do, because sometimes the more you know the more disturbed you get about life in general. Sure, if you have an expectation that something is supposed to happen and it doesn’t, you would like to know the reason why. You don’t want to be left in limbo, because you can imagine all kinds of conspiracies to explain the little diversions in expectations which might have little relation to reality, but which could have a perfectly “rational” explanation. You just want to know what it is, because the alternative is believing that someone just doesn’t give a damn that he or she creating a disruption in your life, that  you are just an anonymous nobody not worth even one thought about.

I work the “swing shift,” which isn’t always conducive for public transport, but I get off work just in time to catch the last bus out home. I manage to get to the bus stop in plenty of time, with the usual three other riders still waiting for the same bus, so I know that I didn’t miss it. This time, we wait, and we wait, and we wait some more. The general consensus is “Where the hell is that bus?”  It is a perfectly reasonable inquiry, since if it doesn’t show up, we are shit out of luck for another three hours, when the next day’s routes begin, and that is three hours of lost sleep. We’re tired, and we want to go home. What is going on here? Twenty minutes after the bus was supposed to pick us up, I decided to do some investigation on the matter. The “layover” location for the buses was a couple blocks up the street, but around a corner so they couldn’t be seen.

So I amble over to see if our bus is actually over there, and if it is, why isn’t it moving yet. It is there alright. The driver is sitting in the cockpit, and I wave at him. What’s up? He opens the door and tells me that he can’t move yet because there is a woman that he picked up on his regular route in Renton that he can’t get off the bus. I see in the middle seats what appears to be a human form laying underneath what appears to be a blanket. The driver mentioned that he believed the woman injured her head, and has called the police. I suggested that given how late he already is that  he should call his supervisor and see if another bus could be dispatched, since it didn’t appear that the police or anyone was arriving any time soon.

I started walking back to the bus stop, but suddenly it occurred to me that maybe someone should give the “first responders” a little nudge and move this thing along, given how increasingly late it was becoming. I called 911 and told the dispatcher about the situation. I provided all the information I could, returning to bus location for additional details. The driver didn’t seem particularly interested himself in providing any information or any particular “urgency” in the matter, but I communicated to the dispatcher that there was a certain amount of “urgency” not just for this person who was driven 20 miles from Renton to this location without any serious attention from the driver beyond being an annoyance, and for the people waiting for this last bus for the night to get us home.

Eventually a couple of transit police and a medical vehicle showed up, by which time the bus was now 30 minutes late. Feeling the problem was in hand and the bus would start moving as soon as the woman was taken off the bus, I returned to the bus stop, apprised those still waiting there of the situation, and assumed everything was in hand, and within 10 minutes or so we would be on our way home.

And we waited, and waited, and waited some more. Presently both the medical vehicle and the transit police left the scene. It was now an hour that passed since the bus was supposed to have picked us up and we were no closer to moving along than before. I decided to investigate again. The bus was still there, but the lights had been turned off. The driver was there, but so too were two Metro vehicles and two female Metro employees who had driven them. I asked the driver what was going on now. He informed me that someone had seen what appeared to be blood on the seat where the woman lain, and apparently it was Metro policy that this put the bus out of commission. Flabbergasted, I asked him what about us? This was the last bus out after all. The driver muttered something about another bus coming, but he didn’t sound like he was sure of that. I asked the Metro people who had arrived on the scene if that was true, and they just acted as if I was nonentity that they didn’t have to respond to.

I returned to the bus stop and apprised my fellow would-be riders of the “update” of the situation.  Another five minutes passed when I observed the Metro vehicles vacate the premises. They didn’t bother telling the people still waiting for the bus of what to expect. After another 10 minutes and no bus in sight, the other people just decided to go back to where they had come from. The first morning bus would not arrive for another 2 hours. I decided one more time to see if the driver was there waiting for a supervisor to bring another bus. He wasn’t there anymore; he apparently left with the Metro people. As far as I was concerned, he had badly mishandled this situation from the start, bringing his problem from Renton to Seattle and making it our problem, and leaving us high and dry. And nobody seemed to give a damn.

Around that time I noticed a bus driving very fast down the road a few blocks away. I thought it curious but maybe it was just some driver heading back to the depot to call it a night. It occurred to me that some of the riders at the other stops might not know what the hell was going on, and I thought maybe I’d mosey on down to them and see where their heads were at. I went to two stops where I knew there should be people waiting for the bus, but saw no one. Either they just gave up and decided on another course of action—or that bus I had seen before was the “replacement” bus and taken a short cut, bypassing the first stops on the route because he or she felt unfairly put out of their way by it, and in a hurry to get it over with.

I returned to the first stop and observed that 30 minutes before the first morning bus was to arrive that someone had finally picked up the bus that had been sitting in the layover location. I “gestured” toward the driver as he sped past, to let him know what me and the other riders there thought about this whole thing.

Now let’s step back and examine this as a “what-if.” What if I had not decided to find out what was going on with bus? I could have just waited and waited and waited like the other people and decided that the bus was just not going to show instead of “expecting” the problem to be eventually resolved. We could imagine that the bus had broken down, or the driver had left “early,” or had taken the “wrong” route. There was any number of scenarios that one could imagine that didn’t involve a false hope.  Would riders still have reason to be angry? Hell yeah, but because they didn’t know for certain the reason for it, it was just one of those screw-ups that occasionally happens.

But what did happen here in fact was not at the top of anyone’s list of what they imagined could have happened. The fact was that it was not handled correctly from the start by the driver when he was still in Renton, because if it was a serious medical emergency then it should have been tended to right there, and alternative transportation should have been dispatched so as not to inconvenience people for whom this was their last transportation opportunity. Nobody at Metro apparently considered that this was a “problem” they needed to concern themselves overmuch with. The driver didn’t care, he was going home anyways. The Metro employees didn’t care; complaints about their behavior are rarely taken seriously by Metro. Talk about lousy “service,” especially since these people depend on riders for their jobs.

Knowing the true facts of the matter just lights a smoldering fire inside, making a bad situation even worse. Was it worth even knowing the “truth” to get angry about? This was one of those situations where it was better to remain in deep ignorance, because knowable facts can be more disturbing than even what one can concoct in their most paranoid fantasies.