The return of the prodigal bus!

I know I said it was going to be a few weeks before I got to continue investigating the case of the missing bus. Well... weeks and days really aren't THAT different, are they?

Anyhow, I was planning to work late every day this week to make up some time from the Memorial Day holiday and my non-paid time off situation. However, with a softball game and a meeting for our Thailand team looming tonight, and the threat of inclement weather meaning the potential for lots of phone calls regarding the softball game, I decided it would be worth my while to be at home at the normal time, if possible. So, I decided to take a shot at catching the 3:25 bus, with the understanding that if it got to be much past 3:35, I was going to head back upstairs and log another half hour of work. I did make a point of being there pretty early anyhow, and wound up waiting at like 3:18. To my joy, the bus showed up at it's old normal time, just before 3:30, and I happily boarded and rode home.

In the interim between my last unsuccessful attempt at catching the 3:25 and today, I had an experience which allowed me to form a theory as to the fate of the missing bus on the previous days. There was a bus driver I hadn't seen on the 4:10 bus last Friday. If you read my blog entry from Friday night, you might remember my comment about not wanting to hear your bus driver say we have to loop back through downtown Harrisburg because she screwed the route up. Well, that was the incident. The unfamiliar driver failed to make a turn on the route, and would have completely missed an important pickup had her passengers not reminded her.

Well, here's the thing. Anytime I've gotten on the 3:25 bus, me and anyone boarding with me at my stop have been the first ones on the bus. There's construction going on in the Capitol Complex, and the street that runs between the Capitol and my office is shutdown between 7th and Commonwealth. The normal route calls for the bus to come down that street from 7th to Commonwealth, but since that's not possible, the bus has been turning one block earlier and coming down Forster before turning onto Commonwealth. My theory is that there was a substitute bus driver las week who, instead of coming down a block early via Forster, came down a block late via South, and with no one on the bus to correct them, never realized the mistake.

So, there you have it, a mystery solved, sort of. I know it's not Sherlock Holmes or anything like that, but I'm just glad my bus was there for me today.