1.                  People waiting for the bus ALWAYS stand in the street!

  As all of you know, I live in LA, the city overflowing with people, especially on the streets.  The freeways, streets, and even residential areas are loaded with cars, so our environmentally conscious residents take the bus.  OK, these are the people without cars or else they’d contribute to the congestion the way I do.  Since most buses sit in the same traffic that all the cars do, people waiting for them get impatient and decide to lean into, step onto, and simply STAND in the street to see if their #20 bus is coming.  When several bus riders are there, it creates a competition to see who can balance on the edge of the curb the longest to check for the bus.  Since I am one of the “economical” drivers on the road that takes full advantage of the far right lane that many neglect, they run the risk of catching a chest full of my compact Ford. 

The last time I checked, buses are the biggest vehicles on the road.  Many of them are orange, red, or bright blue!  They are also the slowest moving vehicles on the road.  If these bus riders are abandoning the security of the bus stop canopy to lean back and forth in the street so that they won’t miss their bus coming, they don’t have to worry.  I don’t think anyone has ever said, “Damn, if I only stood in the street instead of at the huge bus stop, I would have seen that big, red, extra long bus with the accordion in the middle, before it passed me by at 15 mph.”

 

2.                  Those “Erasable” Pens NEVER worked!

  I remember back in 5th or 6th grade when right after the school banned slap bracelets from all us annoying kids that wouldn’t stop snapping them in class, we had to come up with a new gimmick that distracted us from math lessons.  Our answer came in the form of a pen that erased just like a pencil!!  All the rules from Mr. Moran about mathematicians writing in pencil only so that they can correct their mistakes went right out the window with those slap bracelets.  We were so clever, as soon as he caught the smart asses using a pen in MATH class, they’d simply show him the eraser, and rub those mistakes away!!  Once this phenomenon took hold, I noticed that my eraser didn’t seem to “erase” my mistakes.  In fact, it made my mistake a lighter colored one with a blue cloud surrounding it.  Since I was a neat freak when it came to my school work, I immediately threw that useless garbage erasable pen out and went back to my trusty mechanical pencil. 

To my surprise, seemingly everyone else continued to use those stupid pens!  I developed a complex and assumed I must be seeing something different than everyone else, so I kept my reality from everyone else with papers full of blue haze. 

Was I all alone in my observations?  When I returned my kick ball pitch asking for it to be “slow and smooth” was it already so?  Was the pizza the cafeteria served on Fridays actually nasty?  I got over it and eventually realized that deep down inside, you, me, and everyone else always knew that not only did those ink erasers not work, but the pens wrote spotty and lumpy.  Paper Mate got over on us!

 

--JJJ

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