People love to repeat the adage “never run for a bus or a man, there’s always another one in five minutes”. But those people probably had their driver’s licences. Or they didn’t catch the bus in Ireland where the next bus may be a 45-minute wait in the pissing rain. Or if it’s a Dublin Bus it might never have existed in the first place, dropping off the overhead signal board with no explanation. There usually is another man just around the corner but sadly buses are rarer and are usually much more crucial to get us to where we want to go.
I am a strong advocate for running for the bus or the train or whatever transport you need to catch. I don’t care if it’s embarrassing. I don’t care if people are watching. I don’t care if my bangles jangle, my thighs rub together and my shoes make a clamorous clicketyclack sound on the pavement. I just care about making it on board.
I’m also doing an important act of public service belting it down the road in full corporate attire at 8.34am on a Wednesday. There’s a great spectator sport in sitting in traffic or on a bus and wondering if the person sprinting down the path, tote bag flailing on their arm, is going to make it. It’s got all the drama of a miniseries – suspense, danger and human vulnerability.
Sometimes, just when I’ve lost faith in humankind, all it takes is a bus driver deciding to hover at the bus stop until a desperate person has caught up to have it restored. It takes 30 seconds out of their day but it could mean the difference between the other person getting told off again at work and wondering if they’re going to be able to pay their rent if they get sacked on probation. Dublin Bus drivers were in fairness well-practised in the disappearing art of soundness. This was a regular occurrence on Cork Street in Dublin where my regular bus driver once applauded me for getting the change right. I had lived in Ireland all of three weeks and was still getting to grips with euro coins so each day he would pick them out of my palm to speed things up. Until one day I nailed it first go, which was met with an approving “Look at you!” Which is exactly the affirmation I’d been looking for my whole life. That bus driver improved my self-esteem more with that one comment than years of therapy.
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She was just one passenger, it would have made a 10-second difference to our departure. All of us who had been silently willing her to make it were dismayed
Now my primary mode of public transport is a boat. It has its perks, like ruining tourist photos by pretending you’re Tess from the movie Working Girl. And gliding across Sydney Harbour has more romance to it than rattling past Crumlin Shopping Centre on the 77A. But it turns out ferry staff do not have the same sense of care as Ireland’s drivers.
We were heading home on a Saturday night on one of the last ferries of the evening. It was busy but not packed, with tourists looking to see the city lights from the water for less than a fiver and people looking forward to making tea and toast before heading to bed. We scooched our bottoms down on the wooden benches outside so that a few other couples could squeeze in beside us to watch the Opera House glow at night as we reversed out into the black waters of Circular Quay. It gave us the perfect vantage point to watch the last few stragglers run for the boat before it took off. One girl took off down the wharf. We were sure she would make it. The gangplank still had people crossing over. The boat was still moored. The rope hadn’t been cast off.
But one worker raced to cut her off with a metal gate. She was just one passenger, it would have made a 10-second difference to our departure. All of us who had been silently willing her to make it were dismayed. This small slip of a girl sitting alone in the dark on a dock in a city at night felt wrong. The next ferry was a good half an hour away and anything could happen in that window of time in a city as big as Sydney on a Saturday night.
Slowly but then loudly the chorus of boos started like a chain reaction down the boat. I’d never seen a ferry worker get heckled by a crowd before but there was something in his gesture of futile meanness that provoked the reaction. There’s not an Australian equivalent word for “jobsworth” but in that moment all the passengers recognised the spirit of it. For one fleeting second, naturally unfriendly Sydneysiders banded together to recognise that trying your hardest to reach something, as embarrassing as it is, should be rewarded.