So I started a new job about a month and a half ago. If you can't wait to learn about my new job in future posts go here to learn more about where I work. Anyway, rather than drive to work everyday I take public transportation. There are three reasons why I do this:
A) the cheapest place to park downtown is $6.50 per day
2) early morning traffic is worse than this (hard to believe, but its true)
D) my work gives me a bus pass for free
I've been a regular TriMet rider for a solid month and a half and it has been quite the experience. The morning commute to work on MAX (light rail train as pictured above) is generally uneventful as its usually just people going to work. Most of the interesting things I see happen on my way home when the MAX becomes a melting pot of working commuters, students of all ages, financially disabled people, financially wise people, bad parents, a few good parents, environmentalists, a handful of us beautiful people, etc.
By far the most interesting thing I've seen thus far was an all-out fist fight that was broken up by the police. I'm not sure how it started but when I took my headphones off I heard some guy yelling "I don't know how you guys do things here, but I'm from Longbeach. I'm from Cali!" My first thought was to yell back "Then go back to Cali and shut up!" But rather than instigate a fight with someone much bigger than me and already steaming mad I just put my headphones back on. About a minute later I looked over just in time to see the first punch: a solid sucker-punch to the ear/jawbone area. The guy getting punched fell over in his seat while the puncher ran off the train and started an early celebration. But then the punchee got up and attacked the puncher. This was the awesome part because the punchee was much smaller and kicked the crap out of the puncher. Then the police showed up and broke up the fight.
This was a very unusual situation though. Most people on the MAX don't bother anyone else. They just sit there and mind their own business. However, I've noticed that some people are more likely to talk to strangers on the MAX than others. I also noticed a few common characteristics among these people but nothing was consistent with all of them except one thing. Smell. That's right. The smellier they are, the more they want to talk to strangers. I've created an easy to read graph below that will help in my explanation. I've also come up with a smell scale that ranges from 0 to 10. A 0 on the smell scale would be no smell at all. A 5 would be a general beef jerky smell that is definitely bad, but not quite enough to make you get up and change seats. And a 10 is the kind of smell that will make you gag instantly, if not vomit.
As you can see, there is a direct correlation between the smelliness of a person and their likelihood of talking to you. It starts out pretty at a steady rate, but then at about a 5 on the smell scale it begins to rise quicker until you get to a 9. I've noticed through my observational research that after a person goes beyond a 9 on the smell scale the likelihood of them talking to you dramatically decreases to almost a 0% chance. The smelliest of the smelly will almost never talk to you. I've also started noticing a correlation between "crazy eyes" and talking to strangers but I don't have enough definitive information to state any theories yet. Perhaps in a future post.
Anyway, congratulations if you stumbled back onto my blog and for reading through this very long post. If you're lucky, I think next time I'll write about how my job is better than yours.
