One of the things I’ve both loathed and been genuinely grateful for is the public transportation here in Tallahassee. Where I live in “Midtown” (which is a couple of miles north of downtown proper) I’m right on a major route through the city, and while I do have to transfer once at the downtown bus plaza to get to work, it’s not onerous. That said, the buses only run every 30 minutes, and in some cases only once an hour, and they do not actually stick to any kind of rigorous schedule. My bus can be up to to ten minutes late OR early, depending on the driver and, less so, on traffic (my morning bus is supposed to be at the bus stop at 7:17 am, but I need to be there by 7:10 at the latest or risk missing it).
All of which is the lead up to discussing the oh-so-thorough precautions the bus service has taken during this here pandemic:
That’s really about it. When bus services opened again after lockdown, they “officially” had people wipe down all the surfaces whenever the buses pulled into the plaza, but that lasted for only a couple of months and was not done regularly nor efficiently anyway.
Yeah, there is a mask mandate for public transportation but most drivers do not enforce it, if they even follow it themselves. I can usually distance myself from anyone who is not wearing their mask properly, but this morning the bus was crowded because it was cold out (about 35°F, which for Florida is freezing!!!!).
I asked the older, white woman near me to put her mask up over her nose. You’d have thought I was asking her to strip naked or something. She was incensed! Furious! Went on and on about how SHE doesn’t have “the COVID” and SHE isn’t scared of it and SHE doesn’t think masks do anything anyway and…well you get the drift. I simply told her that I don’t care about her opinions and that she just needs to wear her mask properly. By the time we pulled into the station she was threatening to “beat my ass.”
So this here is lesson #4,768 on why I’m glad to be leaving this job. I don’t mind riding the bus but I do mind the people like her who think it’s her right to endanger all her fellow riders and her right to threaten other people over something like wearing a mask. It’s a genuine health risk for me anyway, and without the option to work from home, not one worth taking.
(Before anyone gets on my case about “contact security,” the one time I did request security on a bus was for a deranged white guy who kept talking about how he should “shoot us all” (I don’t even remember why) and the security guard told us (several women) to stop bothering the guy and he’d leave us alone. Did the guy have a gun? I think probably not, as I believe he would have actually shot us if he did. But it was a credible threat and the security guard did not even consider ejecting the guy from the bus. Pretty typical, tbh.)