A Mad, Mad Commute

Anecdote of the day from my yesterday:

As I was exiting the P________ C___ Metro station, there was a woman in a bright yellow muumuu (in subsequent events she mentioned that she is 48 years old) attempting to use the exit stile and having immense difficulty doing so. As I passed by, I noticed that two Metro employees were attempting to instruct her on how to use the stile. She appeared agitated and began yelling at the Metro attendants. I didn't think much of it and left the station.

Waiting for my bus, I found a place to stand above ground near the escalator to the surface. Some two or three minutes later, I heard the same woman, apparently having finally extricated herself from the fare machinery, shouting at people in the tunnel and as she came up the escalator (particularly a group of smokers in their customary place near the escalator).

She transited the bus waiting area, glowering at people as she walked through their midst, and finally settling herself down on a bench. Soon along came a servicewoman, of the same race, in office attire, who sat down on the same bench and proceded to field a cell phone call.

Somehow, this touched off the already disturbed woman, who began yelling, even louder than before, that she didn't need someone talking on the phone, invading her personal sphere and giving her a headache, and that the woman must hang up. Meanwhile, a man in a white t-shirt and very dirty jeans, who had been going up to people in the bus stop begging spare change and indicating that he was the husband of the woman under discussion, moved over to intervene on behalf of the woman on the cell phone. While he was able to provide a physical barrier, the woman continued to shout around him that she was tired of how people would annoy her without good cause, and how she couldn't understand why the cell-phone using woman was being so obnoxious as to continue using the phone when she had provided her plenty of opportunity to stop. She concluded with, "Don't ignore me. It's illegal to ignore me."

Well, the servicewoman had had enough of that, and seeking to remove the cause for contention, got up and moved to a more remote part of the bus stop. Having to explain to the person on the other end of the phone what was going on, however, she found herself unable to suppress a smile and a few laughs at the absurdity of the situation. The angry woman, who had been watching over her shoulder with narrowed eyes, became suddenly livid again, and shouted that the younger woman shouldn't consider herself somehow special just because she was in the service; after all, her own son was in the Marines (I think there may have been some logic to that statement, however, it escapes me at the moment). Then drawing attention to the fact that she had been on this planet longer than the younger girl, and questioning the girl's ancestry, the perturbed woman announced that (paraphrasing for grammatical reasons) it was only by her good graces that the woman was permitted to exist, and that she ought to show appreciation for what a special honor it was to be in her presence. She closed by announcing that she owned this place and the younger woman better do what she wanted.

In the meantime, a gentleman wearing digital camo and packing roughly 250 lbs., all muscle, had wandered over, setting himself almost in between the women, who were about 30 feet apart by now, and effectively foreclosing the possibility of a physical confrontation. The mad woman kept up her loud abuse in the same vein as before, but the crowd had by this point begun to laugh aloud at her efforts.

The bus (a private club bus, not municipal) showed up, and most of us got on. As we settled ourselves in, the driver, normally quite a jovial fellow anyway, sensed the levity of his passengers, and was about to begin questioning us when the yellow-muumuued woman approached the bus. The driver asked to see her club card, and she said "I don't want to ride, I just want to have some parting words with that witch you have on board." The entire bus was filled with uproarious laughter, and the driver, realizing that he was now in on the joke, and beginning to grasp what a good joke it was, had to close the door while he tried to compose himself. Needless to say, discussion of the events didn't stop until we reached our respective stops.

Moral of the story: get rid of your TV and ride public transit, it's much more entertaining.