Rainy and windy in San Francisco this morning when I reached the bus stop at 18th & Guerrero in the Mission to start the work week a day late thanks to the Dr Martin Luther King Jr Holiday yesterday. The MUNI shelter did not in fact provide much shelter and the bus did not in fact arrive as scheduled, so I grabbed a cab and arrived only mildly soaked at the library where I work. As dawn revealed itself through the most westerly-facing of my office windows (partially visible below) and as the thunder and lightning and rain and wind continued, I commiserated in my mind with all the workers who had to be out there in it all day to get their jobs done, even though the worker who was supposed to be driving the early 33 Stanyan route evidently had decided this was a good day not to come to work. "Stalin," I thought enviously, "would never have put up with such an undutiful worker – it would have been the Gulag for that one." There is of course no hope that MUNI will substitute another driver for any of the many, many drivers who call in sick every day – the buses they are scheduled to drive simply do not run.
