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Casual Carpooling: Hitch-hiking to Work

© Bernd Wechner

A friend once told of a friend of his (yes, it's a friend of a friend tale), who was so unhappy with his job he wanted to lose it. He couldn't resign, social security wouldn't kick in if he did, so he had to get sacked. His preferred method for so doing was to hitch-hike to work. The idea being that he'd arrive incessantly and unavoidably late to work. It sounds like an apocryphal tale of sorts even to me, but the moral of the story was, he never arrived late and never lost his job!

I've had the opportunity to sit house for friends a few times this month, out of town, in the bush, among the trees and the birds, in the quiet of the country. We live in the CBD of Hobart and that's a nice change. It does present the problem of transport though. We have a car, but parking in the CBD is an expensive venture in cash and/or time and the car is more useful in my partners hands during the day than parked in front of my office in town. There are busses of course, and not all that irregular at rush hour.

On the first Monday in Fern Tree then I rang the Metro to see when I should expect the bus. No-one was in the office, and the answering machine suggested I try their web-site, or call back after 9. Hmmmph. I took a bus ticket (we keep some on hand) and marched down to the bus stop in one of those freezing wet mornings that Fern Tree Octobers can present ... Brrrr.

I learned a long time ago that the only sensible way to wait for a bus on a clear road is with a thumb out. I never caught the bus. I got a ride in to work. Two weeks later I'd caught the bus only once, and had got to know a dozen or so locals to Fern Tree. Mum's taking their kids to school, commuters heading to work and the occasional alternate lifestyler (what do we call that class of people who've displaced the hippies in their free and easy approach to work, life and love? - bless their souls).

Where we're sitting house right now, my partner's sister and her beau live in a flat downstairs. They're both at uni and both drive klunky old '70s Volvos - quite a fashion here in Tasmania, I've never seen so many old Volvo's before, not even in Sweden - they drive new ones there! Of all the ironies that one day I ended up on the bus, both those Volvo's came past me one behind the other, with the bus hot on their tale! It's a windy mountain road with no shoulder and a bus stop in a hairpin bend. You don't pull in, in front of the bus. Oh well ...