Raptor's Journal

Weird/Annoying Morning
I'm having a weird/annoying morning.

First off I missed the two faster buses going downtown (109 and 112) by about a minute. Then I waited about 10 minutes for another bus (and it was cold out this morning). Finally a #2 came,...in the form of an old, old GMC bus (I thought we were done with those?), packed to the gills. Fortunately another 2 was right behind that one, which was far less packed. Then traffic was just crawling on Stony Plain Road between about 130 St. and 121 St., thanks to the lane closure around 121 St. apparently due to a watermain break that remains unfixed.

Finally the bus gets downtown and stops at Standard Life Place, where this rough-looking fellow gets on and flashes a ragged transfer at the driver while standing there ranting about how he's Mexican, not Native (I actually couldn't tell, but I think he really was Native), and how "Alberta bus drivers" "hate natives and brown people." The driver asked to see the transfer more closely and he goes off on a tirade about how she's being racist and how a white passenger wouldn't have been asked (incidentally, the transfer wasn't valid). The guy rips the transfer from the driver's hand (after one failed attempt to snatch it after which he says "whaddya think you're doing??" and to which she replied "nothing, you did that."), and he sits near me and continues his loud tirade about how all Albertans are racist and hate brown people etc. etc.

Oddly enough, he then gets off at the very next stop, still going on about racist bus drivers even though the driver had been extraordinarily patient with him despite his loud and obnoxious behaviour and invalid transfer. After he got off, the driver pulls away and shakes her head saying, "he has issues." To which I replied simply, "yup."

Lesson for the day: loudly and pre-emptively playing the race card in order to score a free ride on transit all the while ranting about racism is probably the real reason people don't like you, not because of racism.

Work has been a gong show so far. I'm honestly getting tired of how what my department does (build, configuration, and deployment management) seems to be an afterthought, even though almost always we end up bringing up several issues when change requests come our way less than a week before the cut date. It's frustrating that we aren't consulted far earlier in the process in order to help flesh out these issues rather than be expected to deal with them at the 11th hour. I've brought this up several times, and I'm going to bring it up yet again. Think anyone will listen this time? Some of these issues, though, are the kind that should have been fairly apparent to the people in charge of these projects though, too, which is even more frustrating.

Argh.

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