The Day the Bus Came Early

I was forty metres away. The woman with the green helmet was slightly closer and running, which I have never seen her do, and she did not make it either.

Seven minutes early is worse than fifteen minutes late. Fifteen late is a delay and everybody understands a delay. Seven early is a failure of the entire agreement — the whole reason a timetable works is that both parties are held to it, and if the bus can leave early then the number on the board is not information, it is a suggestion.

There were six of us at that stop by 8:05. Nobody was angry, which surprised me. There was a period of about thirty seconds where everyone looked at each other, and then a man said, in a completely level voice, it has done this before, and everybody just accepted the new fact and started working out the next option.

I got in at 9:20. The woman with the green helmet was already there, which means she knows something about the alternative route that I do not, and on Monday I am going to have to break two years of silence and ask her.

It is not a good umbrella. It is grey, one spoke has been bent since March, and it has a plastic handle with a crack in it. There is no version of this object that anybody would steal.

In June I left it at the chai stall. It was behind the counter the next morning and he handed it over without being asked, which means he had noticed it, worked out whose it was, and kept it somewhere deliberate.

On Tuesday I left it on the bus, which I assumed was the end of it. On Wednesday the conductor held it up as I got on, before I had said anything, and gave it back with an expression that made it very clear he had decided this was going to be a recurring feature of his week.

I would like to state that I do not deserve this umbrella. It has been retrieved by two separate people who owed me nothing, and the only thing I have contributed to the arrangement is losing it.

It started because the pantry is small and at one o'clock there is a queue at the microwave, so several of us independently drifted to 1:15, which is the first clear slot.

At some point in about February it stopped being a coincidence. I know this because I now wait if somebody is late, and I did not decide to start doing that.

There has never been an invitation. Nobody has a calendar entry for it. If any one of the four stopped coming there would be no conversation about it, which is either the best or the worst feature of the whole thing and I genuinely cannot decide which.

What I can say is that it is the only part of my working day that nobody scheduled, and it is the part I would be most upset to lose, and I suspect those two facts are the same fact.