Monday mornings are not generally the peak period of my existence. Although my preferred method of transportation has evolved to using Bixi whenever possible, getting to my economics class by 8:30, at the top of a hill with no Bixi docks within any sort of reasonable distance, is something I rely on a bus for. Today, I arrived at the stop just past 8am, which theoretically would have gotten me to class by around 8:20 latest.
It was 8:29 when said bus came, meaning that 4 consecutive planned trips on the one route had failed to show up. The most laughable part of this came when a previously scheduled route had passed our stop a few minutes earlier; my stop being just the second on the route, the backlog of passengers was so large that, by the first stop, the bus had reached full capacity.
Yet at 8:29, I was greeted by a half-smile and brief 'bonjour' from someone who had undoubtedly suffered through a morning infinitely more arduous than mine. I can only imagine the looks, curses and grief he'd received throughout the morning, and that's not just from the riders he was lugging around.
If he works full time, he's making less than 65,000 Canadian a year (and that's a high estimate), if STM's job posting website is anything to go by. He's at the front line of Montréal's dire construction and congestion problems, and on top of it, gets to hear about every one of those problems daily from the thousands of people he serves.
In retrospect, I wouldn't have even expected a quarter-smile.