Fair and Equitable Sucks
There's a book out there titled something along the lines of "
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." I've never read it but I'm sure it's full of things like "don't hit other kids", "say please and sorry", and "share your crayons". All great ideas.
However, I believe there are other kindergarten lessons which should be forgotten, ignored, or at least outgrown. For example, you shouldn't hold your friends' hands to cross the street. Especially if it's a busy street and your friends and you can't agree whether you can beat the oncoming traffic. Worst case scenario, holding hands will get all of you run over. Best case scenario, you look like a group of grown people holding hands as you cross the street.
As a more practical case, not everything requires lining up. In kindergarten, I can see the benefit. Lines make for easy head counts to make sure all the kids that left for recess come back from recess. It probably also instills some sense of discipline and maybe even purpose to those kids who always rush to be the first in that line. In this case, fine, lines are great. On a BART platform with limited width during rush hour, lines suck. Okay, I see that there is limited seating on the train and that imposing the "line" rule is equitable in much the same way that the line for the playground equipment rewards the kid who has waited the longest with his or her choice of the least battered four square ball. However, the platform is only so wide which means that if you line up perpendicular to the tracks, you've now prevented all cross traffic from freely walking to the stairs without having to say "excuse me" two-dozen times along the way.
That's problem one. Problem two is that you now have one line going into a door that clearly allows two people to pass at the same time. Great! you say. That should settle the problem of people trying to get off the train while other people get on. Well, that would all work in theory if that single file line didn't line up smack in the middle of the door!
And then, perhaps most ridiculous of all is the single file line consisting of people whom, once into the train, like to stand right at the entrance, looking left, looking right, trying to find the open seat that they'd like to sit in. "Hmm....should I sit in that seat to the left? No, that fellow looks a bit dirty. Should I sit in the seat to the right? No, the cloth on that seat is fairly soiled..."
For the love of
(insert deity here), Man!! Pick a direction and move! Don't you realize that there's a singly-filed line of people standing behind you, stretching across the platform to the opposite train whose doors are opened and whose own passengers are trying to push around the other singly-filed line queued behind the middle of the its doors, both lines of which are blocking the few passengers who have managed to get off the train from walking through the singly-filed lines of indecisive people waiting for the person who just got on the train to choose which of the dirty BART seats they want to sit on?!?
All I really need to know, I learned in kindergarten. All I later learned I should forget, I discovered by riding BART.
Just Not Meant to Be
I am not a morning person. I think the last time I voluntarily woke up early on a regular basis was about 23 years ago and that was only once a week to catch the Smurfs at 7am. Since then, it's only occurred due to some set of obscene circumstances - like work, for example.This morning, I decided to get a jump start and was up at 4:30am and remotely logged into my laptop at work to do some last minute work on a presentation I have today. Thirty minutes later, I notice that for some reason, the laptop battery meter was showing 20 minutes of life left. How could this be?!? Had I forgotten to plug the power supply back? That can't be it since it would have died a long time before this. Had the cleaning people knocked the plug out or run over the power strip switch with their vacuum? Possibly. Well, the only thing to do at this point is to shower and head into work. Shower, teeth, ears, hair. Shave?? Nah. (A benefit of being Asian is that I can skip a day between shaves and the few slow growing hairs on my chin will still barely be noticeable. A drawback is that I will never be able to grow an Al Borland beard.) Shirt, pants, belt, socks. Fly check #1. (The first noticeable sign of deteriorating mental capacity is that I no longer trust myself to remember to zip my fly so I now need to check several times a day.) Wallet, keys, phone, iPod. Jacket, shoes, work bag. By 5:35am, I'm at the bus stop waiting for the 30x - the express bus that bypasses the mess of traffic, old ladies with grocery carts, and loud kids otherwise known as Chinatown. 5:45am. Still waiting. Fly check #2. Hmm....there goes the regular 30 bus just down the street. 5:50am. Still waiting....and by myself. Could it be that this bus doesn't start this early in the morning? Damn. Guess I'll walk to the 30 line down the block. 5:58am. Waiting. This sucks. Oh wait. Is that someone walking over? Yes. Someone clearly in his corporate monkey gear, bag slung around his shoulder, is walking towards me...towards me...towards me...and passed me. Damn, he's heading to the 30x stop. Crap. Okay, suck up the ego and admit to him that I'm stupid for not checking the schedule before leaving my house today by turning and following him to the 30x stop that I had just been at for 25 minutes. Click, clack, click, clack. I'm about five steps behind him but I'm sure the hard soles of my dress shoes are eliciting at least a mocking smile at my idiocy if not a full, hearty, struggle-to-contain-yourself internal laugh.6:05am. 30x bus. 7:10am, I reach my desk with coffee in hand. 7:11am, I read the e-mail that says,Please be advised that there was a localized power outage in Berkeley this morning. The outage lasted from 2:12AM PST until 5:25AM PST.
So had I hopped online after showering and before leaving the house, I would have known that (1) the first 30x is at 6:05am and (2) the power was back up and I didn't actually have to come into the office early to plug anything back in. Nice.
