They Changed the Route and Told Nobody

It happened at 8:41, at the junction, and I want to describe the actual sequence because it was over in about six seconds and it was one of the strangest things I have watched a group of strangers do.

First, nothing. The bus turned and about twenty people did not look up. Then one woman near the front said something to the conductor, not loudly. Then a man halfway down stood up. Then — and this is the part — about eleven people all lifted their heads within the same second, having registered the turn not when it happened but when somebody else reacted to it.

The conductor said there was work on the stretch by the market and the route was diverted from today. Somebody asked for how long and he said he did not know, in the tone of a man who has been asked this eleven times already and it was not yet nine in the morning.

It adds seven minutes. Seven minutes is nothing. What is not nothing is that I had no idea I was tracking that turn at all until it did not happen.

I found it on the way home. A4, printed, entirely correct, containing the dates and the reason and the alternative stop, and taped to the side of the wheel arch about forty centimetres off the floor.

To read it you would have to be seated in one specific seat, looking down and to the left, which is a posture nobody adopts on a bus unless they have dropped something.

This is not incompetence, and I want to be careful about that, because it is very easy to write the funny version. Somebody printed that notice. Somebody carried it to the depot and taped it up. The work was done. It was simply done in a way where the last two feet of it were left to chance.

The stop itself — where people actually stand, in advance, with time — has nothing on it at all.

The usual stop is a pole. There is a shelter forty metres away that serves a different route and standing under it is a gamble I have lost twice.

The diversion stop is under a rain tree on a side road with almost no traffic, and there is a low wall, and on Monday four of us sat on the low wall in the shade like people in an advertisement for a better city.

It adds seven minutes and I have got those seven minutes back and more, because I am no longer standing in the sun doing the calculation about the shelter.

The work finishes in three weeks. Everybody at that wall on Monday morning knew it and nobody said it, and we sat there in the shade with the specific quiet of people enjoying something on loan.

I counted for a while and then stopped counting, because counting felt like the wrong thing to be doing while watching a man absorb a morning.

Every single person boarding after the junction asked. Most of them asked the same three words. He gave the same three answers each time, at the same volume, without shortening them, which is much harder than it sounds by the twentieth repetition.

One man was rude about it. Properly rude, at a volume, about a diversion the conductor did not decide and was not told about until his own shift started. The conductor said the three things again and moved down the bus.

There is a version of this paper that is only about the bus. But the bus is about eleven people doing a job in public where every single decision made above them arrives as their problem, at knee height, on an A4 sheet.