On public transport... Again...

Yeah, so about public transport... Amazingly enough it appears that the amount of headaches public transport causes makes all of life's other problems seem very manageable and relatively insignificant. Let's recap...

1) The people. Not to sound elitistic or anything, but it's incredible how people are not able to take care of basic hygiene. It's very uplifting to wake up, wash up, and dress up, only to get on a bus and have a person who reaks of urine sit next to you and a person with long, unwashed hair with ticks and such sit in front of you. Not to criticize people's various lifestyles, but could you be considerate towards other people? Pretty please... And the polar opposite in this category are the women who are serious abusers of all sorts of fragrances. These aren't restricted to merely public transport, but all walks of life. We all know the types of people who you can smell from hundreds of meters away. Maybe tone down the amount of perfume?

2) The space, or lack off. I'm a bit over 1.9 meters tall and in decent physical shape. The number one problem is: leg room. Finnish buses aren't fortunately in the same league as the buses in Malta, but it is a rare day when I don't contemplate amputating my legs. It's impossible to fit in the seat. As an offshoot of being this size in general is that the width of my shoulders, while not in any way comparable to bodybuilders of any type, is what it is and I can't do much about it. Combine this with the first point regarding people, and things get interesting. Just today I ran across a situation where the bus was half-empty. I managed to get an entirely empty seat, but the legroom wasn't that nice. So I decided to sit by the aisle to compensate for the problem. Of course a fellow co-passenger absolutely positively has to sit next to me, despite the fact that there are more seats with more space available. Fair enough; who am I to take up two seats, so naturally I move over. Then begins the bitching and moaning: why do you take up so much space, can you be any narrower, I'm having difficulty staying on my seat, and so on... I'm sorry, but a) I am a big guy and have a certain amount of space that I must have in order to fit; I can't become any smaller without the help of a saw, and b) could You go on a diet, since the size of your arse is something that you can affect.

3) The drivers. Somehow it's very surprising that there can occasionally be people on bus stops who would like to get on a bus. Yeah, I know, it's completely unbelievable! But it just so happens that this is the case. So it shouldn't come as a surprise to bus drivers that there might be people on the stops. So please, look at the bus stops and slow down enough to see if people would like to get on. And if there are people, could you slow down and let them on, instead of driving past and acting as if you didn't see them at all? Then there is the fact that in Finland we occasionally have a phenomenon called slush. It's a type of mixture between snow and water and it's very annoying. So when the bus driver decides to pass the stop without stopping, of course the natural thing to do is speed up enough and aim for the slush so that you can throw it on the people who are standing on the stops. Especially so when near business parks: I bought these made-to-measure suits just so that you can destroy them to demonstrate your power over us mere mortals. And I enjoy having them dry-cleaned after every use.

4) The scheduling. It is surprising that we have different type of weather at different points of the year. It's so surprising that it seems that the guys who plan the schedule seem to think it's completely irrelevant to take this into account. So naturally when the winter comes you can just ditch your schedules and don't even bother looking at Reittiopas. The bus will come when it comes, if it comes. One would imagine that operating a bus fleet wouldn't be rocket science: you drive from point A to point B via a certain amount of stops. You plan the schedule to be realistic and then add compensating amounts of time when external, environmental aspects force you to do so. But apparently operating a public transport company is even more difficult than putting a man on the moon and getting him back in a sane amount of time.

So yeah, I'm having a difficult time to see why I should voluntarily suffer the public transport. Fair enough, the company does subsidize it enough to make it practically free for me. But let's ask the question in another way: if I promised to drive you from point A to point B for free, would you take the offer? Undoubtedly. But would you still take the offer if you had to take an incredible amount of shit at the same time? Most likely not. So I would like to be a nice person and hug all the trees and save the world, but my annoyance threshold is closing in at a pace which begs the question: is all this really worth it when I could just lease a BMW Z4 and drive like a lunatic and have fun commuting to and from work, instead of suffering public transport in all the multiple different ways as I currently do...