Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Despite the fact that it’s a holiday week, it’s been pretty harried for me. I believe I’ve mentioned before that we’re headed for Ashland, OR on Sunday for our annual haj to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and, since I took a long weekend last week, I’ve been humping work pretty seriously this week in order to slip out of town.

Something new I started doing this week is using my bike to commute to work. Since I’m a computer consultant running my own business, I often have to flit around town from client to client, and that kind of itinerary does not lend itself well to either using transit or biking. For the last year or so, though, I’ve been doing a lot of work for a client over in Redmond, and the trek over there from my residence here in sorta-urban Seattle requires a trip across Lake Washington on one of the two floating-bridge freeways that connect Seattle to the eastern suburbs.

As the region has grown, these bridges have become nightmarish commuting bottlenecks. Any little glitch during prime commuting hours can consign all of those behind to a hellish commute. I often wonder how traffic backups get started. I continue to presume that I’m a victim of the timid, the unskilled and the just plain stupid.

Anyway, I’ve been driving this commute 3 - 4 times weekly when I’m in town, after years of studiously avoiding it, and I just cringe when I approach a backup in either direction. Yeah, I’ve got an iPod I can plug into the stereo deck, but it’s just such a waste of my prodigious talent to sit in traffic for a couple hours a day.

Then last weekend during our camping trip, I was talking with someone who said he also commuted to the east side, and rode his bike to the bus pickup on the west side of the 520 bridge, put his bike on the bus’s rack and bused the rest of the way to his office. I’ve lived here for nearly 33 years, many of those as an avid cyclist, and never once have I put my bike on a bus. I think that’s because, in the city, I can usually bike faster than most bus routes, with their frequent stops and spotty timeliness. But, with this casual conversation, a light went off in my head, and Tuesday morning found me screaming down the hill on my bike from my house to the western terminus of the 520 bridge.

The first bus that came by was actually the one that I’d set my sights on, but the first reality of bus-biking arose when all three slots on the bike rack were already filled. Someone told me that , since that route also served Microsoft, the bike rack was often full. I was saved moments later when the second reality of bus-biking presented itself - a bus that was out of operation and heading back to its base stopped for three of us bikers who’d been awaiting a lift. Dead-heading buses can blow by passengers, but they have to pick up bikers waiting to cross the bridge.

Anyway, it worked great that first day. Once we debarked on the east side, a nice young woman who was headed for Microsoft guided me through the labyrinthine byways to a bike path that ran to within a half-mile of my workplace. I glided into our parking lot, parked my bike and swaggered into the office feeling like I’d accessed life from a completely new portal. Bike commuting significantly lowers the bar for the concept of “business casual”, but my perspiration and hyperventilating seemed to engender more admiration than disdain (it’s an outdoor equipment manufacturer, after all).

I did the same commute on Thursday and Friday. The interesting thing about Friday was that the Sound Transit bus that picked me up was equipped with experimental WiFi capability. It’s only offered, interestingly, on the route that drops you off on the Microsoft campus. As I boarded and looked for a seat, a good number of folks had their laptops, Blackberrys and whatever else out and were diligently keyboarding.

I popped my laptop out of my backpack and booted it, hoping to send an exciting blog-post from the bus, but my ride was only about 10 minutes long, and, although I was able to obtain a connection and an IP address, I couldn’t coax it to let browse the internet, so I shut it down and awaited my stop at the Microsoft campus.

I had a vicarious thrill getting off at Microsoft, with the “It’s a Small World After All” crowd that you find there, and at so many meritocratic high-tech venues, but my failure to gen up an internet connection on the bus is probably a metaphor for why they strolled on to their cubicles, gourmet cafeterias and stock options, while I strapped my helmet on and rode off to the lower echelons of Redmond.