It seems all the good stories in Edmonton happen on or around the bus routes.

This morning, because my bike is out of commission (the forks collapsed as I was riding it, throwing me 6' and cracking a rib), I took the bus to work.

The trip seemed like it was going to be pretty uneventful, full of tired morning commuters; that is, until we started taking the bus detour.

The bus is being detoured from its normal route for a couple of reasons: first, they have been working on the Walterdale bridge and have it shut down to one lane; more significantly, the turnoff the bus would take after the bridge has been shut down for a combined archaeological dig / street upgrade. So now, the bus has to go two blocks up and take a side road, which has a nice big set of blocking barriers with ROAD CLOSED pasted all over them.

Normally, this doesn't cause problems. However, this morning, an Edmonton nutbar decided to completely ignore the large, orange, ROAD CLOSED sign, and pulled up just as our bus was turning on to the street. The small car met nose to nose with our bus, and -- and this is the part I just can't understand -- decided to have a faceoff with it.

Now perhaps some discussion of physics is in order here. The car, were I to render its size down to this page, might look something like this:

..

The bus, should I do the same, would look like this:

__

Obviously, one of the two is larger, heavier, and able to do more damage than the other. Yet the driver of the car continued in her standoff, refusing to budge, psychically insisting that the bus back up, let her by, then continue on its way.

She also took a sip or two of coffee, perhaps as an aid to her ESP.

This literally continued for about 5 minutes, amidst snickers and muttered "I don't believe she's doing that"s from the passengers on the bus.

Finally, without admitting defeat, the motorist backed her car up, while flipping off and cursing at the bus driver. She then drove beside the bus, rolled down her window, and started screaming at the bus. Her words were incomprehensible - likely, given the look in her eyes, she was speaking the devil's language.

So what's the moral today, kids? It's multivalent: first, if there's a large body of metal weighing thousands of pounds and full of tired, irritable commuters who haven't had their coffee yet, it's not a good idea to hold up their bus while you take a sip of yours. Second, perhaps paying attention to the large, obvious ROAD CLOSED signs is a good way to avoid starting the morning irritated that your psychic ability is being tested and has failed. And third, if you still do something like this in the presence of our humble author, your acts are likely to end up on a website, viewable to all.