The cars behind the bus go wait, wait, wait

Driving behind a school bus is like trailing a really slow guy on the sidewalk who doesn’t realize you’re there and won’t let you pass him. The difference is that, in the latter situation, I have no compunction about dashing quickly into the street and bounding ahead of said slow man. Pulling a similar stunt in the bus scenario would not only put children needlessly at risk, but forever shame me with the label of Jerk Who Passed School Bus.

But man, is it tempting.

It would be one thing if the bus never stopped, like the bomb-rigged bus from “Speed” that would explode if it went too slow. Buses can gather some good velocity, but only with a head start of roughly, say, New Jersey. Any distance shorter than that, and a kid on a bike could outpace one and still have enough wind at the finish line for a game of hopscotch, or cyber Pokemon Hunger Games football, or whatever they play nowadays.

Of course, a school bus can never inch its way up to an acceptable speed, because bus routes now require that it make a stop about once every block and a half. When I pull onto a street on a school day afternoon and see that big square yellow butt staring at me, I know exactly what to expect: Stop. Let two children out. Inch forward at five miles per hour. Stop two feet down the road. Let three more children out. Repeat. I could do my taxes and choreograph the Ice Capades in the time it takes a bus to go down May Street.

Now there’s nothing that makes a person feel old like starting a sentence with the phrase, “Back in my day.” It implies something curmudgeonly, a cantankerous nostalgia for the way things used to be. But you know what? I’m a curmudgeon, so screw it: Back in my day, the bus never stopped that often. It didn’t have to. Our stops were spaced farther apart, and if one of us was unfortunate enough to live a quarter mile from one, we sucked it up and walked there.

When I was a wee lass taking the bus to middle school, I lucked out: The stop was right at the end of my street. It took about four minutes to walk there, sometimes a little more in icy weather. My friend Kevin, who met us there every morning, had his own nearby stop, but elected to walk to ours instead; a close-knit group of friends, it was hardly a complete morning without the full gang present to trade cards and share stories about girls and boogers. Kevin walked almost a full mile for this daily rite. He trudged up and over a hill so steep and massive, its legend earned it a name: Applesass Hill. And yes, he walked up Applesass Hill in the freezing cold and snow. The clichés are true.

Contrast that with today, when a child has to trek no further than the neighbor’s bronze statue of a peeing angel. Now admittedly, I’m not a parent. Perhaps my feelings would be different if I were sending my own nine-year old out into the freezing cold to wait for a ride on a rickety bus with no seat belts. But it seems that, with the proper guidance on how to be safe, letting a child walk even a ninety-second journey would be character-building. And that’s not to mention the exercise factor: In a country where childhood obesity is considered an epidemic, encouraging a kid to put one foot in front of the other hardly seems like the worst
thing that could be done.

If the trend continues, then changes will have to be made to that age-old ditty about the wheels on the bus. “The wheels on the bus go ‘round and ‘round,” according to that childhood staple, but that’s no longer accurate. The wheels on the bus go ‘round. Then they stop while the rest of us wait.

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During a recent call to York County Superior Court, it took about three solid minutes to get ahold of a person – an actual, honest-to-goodness human being. Three minutes doesn’t sound like a long time, but for someone accustomed to hearing “Hello?” after three or four rings, it’s an eternity.

The wait was because of what’s called a “phone tree,” which I believe was invented by medieval torturers looking to extract murder confessions from bloodthirsty barbarians. You’ve dealt with phone trees before. If you’ve ever called a courthouse, school, library, or law office, you’ve heard that automated message: “Thank you for calling the Office of Whoever. For a staff directory, press ‘one.’ To spend the rest of your life on the phone and never speak to a breathing homo sapien again, press ‘two.’”

If left unchecked, phone trees will slowly spread and wipe out humanity like the killer machines in “The Matrix.” Or at least they’ll make all of our phone calls profoundly annoying. They’re increasingly unavoidable, and the menu options are getting increasingly long. Any longer and they’ll be voiced by James Earl Jones and sold in bookstores.

A perfect case in point is the phone tree for the Massabesic school system. I called a few months ago trying to get ahold of a staff member at the high school, but dialing their number no longer gets you the actual school. Instead, the number connects you to a central hub, from which you can be transferred to the high school, middle school, elementary school, or the central district office. Convenient if you’re a robot, irritating if you’re flesh-and-bone.

Why can’t I just speak to a receptionist and ask to be connected to someone? That’s usually what ends up happening anyway, because the options on the menu never correspond to the actual help you need. I don’t know the extension of the person I’m trying to reach, I don’t need to call my child in sick, and I don’t need to speak to somebody in food services, although, really, try a little harder on the mashed potatoes. I just want to talk to the chemistry teacher so I can ask him about beakers and stuff.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when phone trees started taking over the world. They are to phones what Ryan Gosling is to movies: You never really noticed them coming until they were already there.

They certainly weren’t as prevalent ten or twenty years ago. Back then you would call a place, and a bored or polite-sounding person would gently guide you in the right direction; it was bliss, because when you’re talking to an honest-to-goodness receptionist, who communicates in human language instead of binary code, you can make your intentions understood quickly and succinctly. A person doesn’t have a list of options that you have to sift through. They have minds, and those minds are capable of assessing what you need and helping you to get there.

 The only argument I’ve heard in favor of the phone tree system is that it saves receptionists time and effort. That’s all well and good, but if that’s the goal, it seems like we should at least wait until technological advances have made this less of a pain in the rump for callers – maybe when all robots have the cognitive ability of that big black computer that kicked so much butt on Jeopardy.

Until then, my head will remain firmly in the clouds, envisioning a pipe-dream utopia where people answer phones and robots stick to doing robot things, like making coffee or opening cans of dog food. We’re a long way off from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Terminator.” In the time we have left before that eerie reality, let’s talk. You may not be James Earl Jones. But you’re better than the alternative.

Fight for your whites

I’m not exactly what you would call a fashionista.

My blindness to chic clothing choices, like so many things, probably stems from my childhood, when my firm placement in the social company of fellow geeks assured that my fashion sense didn’t really matter: I could dress as slickly and suavely as I pleased, but at the end of the day, I was still going to be holed up in the attic playing Risk all day against the kid with the lazy eye. At that point, it’s not like sweatpants and a Garfield T-shirt are going to contribute any noticeable amount of shame.

Of course, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been forced – by work, by societal expectations – to leave the sweatpants at home and make at least some kind of effort. That effort, while there, is still minimal. I’ve always taken a strictly practical approach to clothes: They exist, I reason, to prevent my nakedness. The guy at 7-11 probably doesn’t want to see me in my birthday suit, and besides, I need pockets to carry my Big Gulp change.

So admittedly, it’s with an outsider’s perspective that I question the fashion rules governing the choices of the more stylish among us. Perhaps the most well-known fashion rule, even among clueless schlubs like me, is the one that comes up every year around this time: Don’t wear white after Labor Day.

That’s what people always tell you. But they never tell you why.

Fortunately – I guess – I’ve never stopped being a geek, and so my Google-searching skills are tuned to the precision of a ninja master’s drop-kick. My fingers wagging with excitement, I took to the ‘Net, optimistic that I could solve the mystery of why autumn white is so taboo.

The answers I found were less than satisfying. Instead of finding the definitive origin I was looking for, I had to settle for a lot of theory and conjecture. Probably the best explanation I found, from “Timothy” at Yahoo! Answers, is that white tends to be cooler, temperature-wise. Darker colors absorb more heat from the sun, and so while white is an ideal color choice for summer fashion, donning it in cooling temperatures makes about as much sense as wearing a down jacket to a clam bake in June.

But while that’s a sound basis for a purely logical clothing decision, it still doesn’t explain why it has been decreed an official fashion rule by the taste-makers – those faceless shadows who smoke long cigarettes while stroking poodles and scoffing at things. I mean, when you see a guy standing outside in a snowstorm wearing shorts and a T-shirt, you don’t say, “My, what an odd fashion choice.” You say, “Wow, that guy’s an idiot and will die soon.”

Besides, the rule extends to accessories as well, and the colors of one’s accessories generally aren’t dictated by the weather. You don’t see a lot of people wearing white belt buckles to stay cool. If you want to extrapolate the no-white rule to its furtherst extreme – and many people do – then those observing it would be forbidden to wear white glasses, driving gloves, neckerchiefs, shoelaces, wristbands, socks, rings, and Breathe Right Strips. I wonder if the fact that I’m Caucasian is in itself a fashion faux pas.

Fortunately, the rule has been relaxed somewhat in recent decades. But every year, someone will remind you about it. I say rebel. I say, the next time someone haughtily informs you that fall means ix-nay on the hite-way, brazenly defy them by donning the most blinding outfit you can muster; heck, paint your face white and dress like the world’s brightest mime, if that’s what it takes. Because the rule is arbitrary, and it’s about time the fashion-conscious among us take back this most common of colors.

Not that I count myself among the fashion-conscious, of course. While you all are reclaiming white for the fall, I’ll be breaking out the ol’ sweatpants to see if they still fit. An outfit like that has got to be acceptable somewhere.