Hello there Top Men and Top Women. It’s story time in blog corner.
So my city’s bus company decided to switch from simple cardboard bus passes to magnetic strip passes. When you get on the bus, you swipe your card and the bus records your ride. You have to pay a deposit for your first pass and trade in your old pass every month for the new one. They then reprogram the cards from the previous month to be used the following month. Yay technology, right? (Oh, not all buses have a reader so when you get on one of those, you just show the card which has no distinguishing features to be able to tell if it’s for the correct month or not.
I bought my December pass on Thursday and all was good in the world…until I tried to use it. The reader kept saying it was expired even while clearly recognizing it as a card for the month of December. I used it several times over the weekend and each time, the reader said it was expired. It took until Sunday for one of the bus drivers to tell me I could go to city hall to get a replacement card. So that’s where I went today after work. The transaction was smooth and within five minutes I was out of there. Next destination: Wal-Mart for new winter shoes. Problem: the next bus in that direction wasn’t due for forty minutes. Neither was the bus home.
So I walked to Wal-Mart and got there with very little time to spare before the bus home was set to pass. Was I going to have to spend an hour at Wal-Mart? I could feel the minutes ticking away as I tried to find a suitable pair of shoes in my size (no easy feat…or should I say feet? Ahhhh homophones!) I found a pair, tried them on and checked my watch. If the bus was a couple of minutes late (not unusual) I might have enough time to pay and get out to the bus stop in the parking lot in time.
I paid and made a beeline to the door. Once outside, I could see the bus in the distance waiting at a red light before being able to roll into the parking lot. I ran and made it to the bus stop with just enough time to start catching my breath before the bus pulled up. Mission accomplished!
So that’s my mundane story for the week. No gaming experiences to share other than we played the penultimate mission of our Imperial Assault campaign. David can’t make it next Sunday so barring any other scheduling conflicts, the thrilling conclusion will take place on December 17th. Will the Empire (me) win out? Find out on the 18th!
That’s all for this week. Have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday! Carja V.