On Campus

Public transportation: the reason I need my driver’s license

Scott tests out his future commute to university

Last weekend, my sister and I took the bus to the University of Waterloo. It was sort of a practice run for September, when we’ll be starting our first year at university. All three of our younger brothers, who had never been on a city bus before, insisted on coming along. From the moment we boarded the bus, they were awed: by some unknown, mystical process, the large advertisement that covered the outside windows of the bus- get this- couldn’t be seen from the inside. And never mind the big red ‘STOP’ button on every second pole.

I couldn’t even pretend I didn’t known them. Every time they expressed their amazement at a feat of technology- like the folding-up bus seats, or the light-up sign on the front of the bus that would… uh… light up- it was followed by a, “Scott, look at that!”

It was like sitting beside three Amish people.

On the way home, when there weren’t enough seats for all five of us, every single one of my Amish brothers suddenly developed 21st-century germophobia. Meaning, I had to be the one to hold on to the bus pole. The same pole that 5.3 billion other people have touched (every single person in Kitchener has used the city bus. A thousand times each). Which would have been fine — if the human sub-species known as, “nose-picking eight-year-old,” didn’t exist.

When my ten-year-old brother Michael suddenly burst out, “Look at THAT!” I expected to see a dead body tucked under one of the seats (at which point the Law and Order theme song would have started). Instead, there was a mummified piece of cheese. With fur.

Michael and David quickly decided that, no matter how many billions of dollars a hypothetical billionaire would offer them, they wouldn’t lick the fuzzy cheese. And if it somehow ended up on their Obi-Wan Kenobi or Jango Fett, they wouldn’t try to separate cheese from Star Wars action figure.

But for ten bucks, either one of them would poke it with a stick. And then put it on the other’s pillow.

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