Forty Minutes, Door to Desk

It is the second window seat on the left, behind the wheel arch, and the reason it is the good one is that the window there actually opens. Four of the others are painted shut and two are jammed with a bolt somebody added on purpose.

The competition for it is polite and completely silent. There is a woman in a green helmet — she carries the helmet, she does not ride, I have never asked — and a man with a steel tiffin box, and me. Whoever gets to the stop first gets it. Nobody has ever said a word about this arrangement out loud.

On Monday I got there at 7:58 and the woman in the green helmet was already at the pole. She looked at me. I looked at her. She got the seat, which was correct, and I stood for the first ten minutes, which was also correct.

This is my first edition. I have been reading other people's for about three weeks and I kept thinking my mornings were too small to write down. Then I counted and there are about forty minutes in each one and something happens in most of them.

The stall is between the bus stop and the office gate, so it is not a detour, it is on the way, which is the only reason a habit like this survives.

Less sugar. That is the whole of my order and I said it once, in 2024, and have not said it since. He sees me at the edge of the crowd and starts it. By the time I have got to the counter it is in the glass.

I have thought about why this feels like more than it is. I think it is because it is the only transaction in my entire day where somebody has remembered something about me without being paid to have a system for it. My bank knows more about me than he does and has never once got anything right on the first try.

He runs the stall with his brother, who is louder and does the money. I have no idea what either of them is called. This is the part of the arrangement I am least comfortable with and I have not yet fixed it.

At 7:50 the road is a road. At 8:00 it is a negotiation. The difference is ten minutes of sleep, and I have had this argument with three separate flatmates and lost it every time.

I do not think the argument is actually about the ten minutes. I think it is that arriving early with nothing to do feels like waste, and arriving late while visibly suffering feels like effort.

I stand at the gate for six minutes most mornings doing nothing. It is the best six minutes I get.

Two lifts, eleven floors, and a building that fills between 8:50 and 9:10. I have timed it four times and the average wait in that window is just over nine minutes.

The bus does eleven kilometres in thirty-two. The lift does forty metres of height in nine. As a rate of progress this is worse than every other part of the journey by a factor I have chosen not to calculate precisely.

There are stairs. I have used them twice. Both times I arrived at the fourth floor in a state that made the next twenty minutes worse than the nine I had saved, and both times somebody said something about it.

So I stand in the queue. It is the only part of the entire commute where I am indoors, stationary, and surrounded by people I know, and I have started to think it might be the actual worst part precisely because of that.