Climate: A Day Late, but It's My July Theme

 

I intended to post this picture last night, but I got home at nearly 11 p.m. and fell asleep shortly after. 

The picture was taken at the bus stop where I was waiting for any one of two scheduled buses. During that time a strong thunderstorm blew through, bringing straight-line winds that I was afraid might be a tornado. Until the winds, the shelter kept me dry. I raised my little umbrella as a shield against the rain, then took out my camera to record the actual raindrops reflected in the fabric of my umbrella. The rain was heavy enough that drivers chose to keep their cars on the inside lane, on the crown of the road to avoid the pooled water at the intersection.

No buses came. My cell phone is broken and the new one had yet to arrive, so I could neither check the transit apps nor call for help. At one point, lightning cracked above me - and you can bet I was not sitting on the metal seat!

Eventually, I noticed a bus coming towards the stop, but its signage read OUT OF SERVICE. The driver stopped, asked where I was going, then motioned for me to get on the bus, where I joined several other people, all of whom had been left stranded because the transit system does not have enough drivers to cover all the scheduled routes. The woman who was driving had been asked by her supervisor to drive the route for the bus to my neighborhood, as well as an additional branch of that route to another area. She made sure the other people, none of whom spoke English, got safely to their stop, then backtracked to my neighborhood. I arrived at my apartment's warmth at about 11 p.m., took off my sodden clothes, and sank into my bed.

A month ago, I made a little odyssey that involved shopping on one side of town, then going to see a movie at a theater on the other. Because of detours and traffic delays, trips that generally took two hours instead took three to four hours. While waiting for the bus home at the transit center, a security guard asked me whether I felt okay. In contrast to last night, the weather that day had been glaringly hot, in the nineties, and as I told him, I was "hot, tired, and flat pissed off." He told me about the driver shortage and the company's difficulty in finding, and retaining, qualified drivers. 

This brings to mind another sort of climate, that of one's working environment. I've heard this story repeatedly as well as having experienced it myself -- it's not that the people don't want to work, it's that they no longer want to spend their careers in a toxic atmosphere. When a company that pays well and is a union shop can't keep its workers, I'm willing to bet the management is the problem.

As previously mentioned, this photo is meant as the July theme day post for City Daily Photo. To see how other photographers around the world have interpreted the theme, click on the link or the badge to the right of this post.