Misconceptions

This may sound rather bigoted of me.  As a fair warning, I expect as much.  However, that's what this is about, so let's just barge ahead and roll with it.

Last week, I began taking the bus home from work (at the University, UBCO).  Before that, my parents were picking me up. 

Before that, I had an opinion on the bus. 

I thought buses were dirty, despicable things; vehicles to be used only by what I considered city 'slum dwellers' for lack of a better term...  people who couldn't afford a car, could barely afford a house, and had no other means of transport for traveling distances longer than walkable.

I had a picture, (in my defense, partially brought on by news stories about bus travellers) of creepy people who hadn't bathed in days, and ignored by and ignorant of the people surrounding them; tuned into music, absorbed in their books, asleep - people you generally wouldn't want to talk to.  Not respectable, hardworking, regular folks.

Even buses themselves didn't escape my judgment.  In my head, they were simply an effort by the city to help clear up congestion and give poorer people an alternative to walking.  Hardly ever cleaned (who sees a bus that doesn't have mud and dust all over it when it's owned by the city?), inside or out.. to me, they were little better than filthy deathtraps filled to the brim with society's less than privileged classes.

Don't ask me where I got this image.  As I said, it's been partially instilled from news articles, but I can't blame it all all those.  Before last week, I'd only ever been on a bus twice that I can remember, so experience wasn't to count for it.. although stories from friends and aquaintances who were experienced busers certainly helped fuel the fire.

Regardless, given my beastly preconception of what a bus was and what kind of people partook of their services, I was naturally in for a rude awakening. 

I was terrified the first time I rode it home.. and I turned into one of those people I abhorred in my thoughts.  Staring at my cell phone as I surfed Facebook with it, refusing to look up and make eye contact with anyone, and desperately wishing for the ride to be over, I cowered and I'm sure everyone noticed.  Luckily for me, I had unknowingly sat beside a coworker, and she deigned to speak to me, even though I was ignoring her (and everyone else) as hard as I could.  Nothing has ever been so welcome in my life as the realization that I wasn't alone on this horrible bus on this terrible first day. 

She readily answered all my bus-related questions and showed me how to make sure I got off at the right stop; in hindsight, as many of you probably know, it's not very hard.  To one as frightened and uncomfortable as myself at that moment, though, it was as if a golden nugget had been presented to me. 

I've now been riding the bus home for nearly two weeks.  You have probably already seen that my perception of public transport has changed, and changed drastically.  Firstly, the bus is not a germ-breeding ground.  Although not as clean and comfortable as a personal vehicle (which would be nearly impossible) it is as clean as one could expect a large vehicle to be when hundreds of people get in and out every day and it travels all over the city.

I have met some interesting individuals, but none I'd consider especially weird or scary.  I was duly surprised to see a woman dressed in a business suit and heels board the bus the other day.  The piece of information that smacked me straight up in the face?  People don't always use the bus because they have to, and they're not all poor and uneducated social outcasts.  There's no parking at the university.. 2,500 spaces and 7,000+ students, faculty, and staff.  Many of them are, like me, just trying to save money in parking passes and subsequent tickets because the passes are sold out.  You probably just noticed the italics.  Like me.  That was the clincher. 

I am not a uneducated, disheveled social outcast, and I'm riding the bus.  That must mean that there are others who also aren't city gypsies, and simply find the bus a better option.

See?  Told you this might be considered bigoted.  But I'm not arrogant enough to refrain from admitting it.

I was wrong.

In so many ways.  The worst of which being that I formed an opinion of something that really had little basis in fact, and a lot more in hearsay and imagination. 

Do you have a similar picture in your head of something?  A conception that you really haven't checked out, a something that you don't like, but don't really have good reasons to answer that question, "Why?"

I challenge you to challenge yourself to change the way you think about the world you don't know.  You might be just as surprised, and just as wrong, as I was.