h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Other ways to force the bus to turn up:

1. Use the nearby cash machine, which will quite unaccountably take ages to process your transaction and not return your card quickly enough for you to catch the bus which was waiting around the corner for just such an occasion.

2. Light a cigarette. I don't smoke myself, but I have it on good authority from those that do, that this procedure works even better now that the buses around here are entirely non-smoking. (A good thing in my opinion, especially if you have ever experienced a smoky bus on a cold, wet morning)

3. Bus arrival probability is inversely proportional to your desperation to use the public convenience at the destination. (Moral: Go before you leave )

4. Read an interesting article in the newspaper, thus allowing the bus to sneak up and pass you.

5. Find a bus stop equipped with someone who will flag down every bus that comes past to ask them if they go to a place that they cannot adequately describe, and which they get into deep philosophical discussions with the bus driver about. (The length of the discussion is at it's longest when it's your bus). These people also want to pay for their 85p single fare with a twenty pound note, or by cheque.

Finally, if your bus is early, it will immediately stop after you get on to get back on time, allowing the previous bus (for which you have been waiting for the past hour) to zip past 45 minutes late, making up that time, and getting to your destination far earlier than you do.

"Finally, if your bus is early, it will immediately stop after you get on to get back on time, allowing the previous bus (for which you have been waiting for the past hour) to zip past 45 minutes late, making up that time, and getting to your destination far earlier than you do."

And, of course, if at any point DURING your journey the driver feels he has to stop to make up his time, it will always be the stop immediately before the one where you, personally, want to get off.

This creates several bus-logic conundrums.

i) The next stop, the one I personally want, is about 600 yards up the road, which is slightly over a quarter of a mile, or four minutes walk if I go at a nice steady pace. The driver has parked here because he's a few minutes early. I can see him, he's sitting up front reading his Daily Star at an "I've got-all-the-time-in-the-world, me" pace.

If I get off here, will it be quicker to walk that five or six hundred yards to the front door of my workplace?

Inevitably, you make the wrong choice. You get off, you start walking, and when you're halfway there, the bus that you could have sworn wasn't going to move for hours passes you.

You sit on the bus and minutes pass. You soon realise you COULD have got off and walked in through the door, and this particular driver would only just about have got to the mandatory centre-spread of naked ladies in the Daily Star, and still not have moved.

Bus-logic dictates that whatever choice you make will inevitably be THE WRONG ONE. Live with it.

Experience gleaned from the 370 (Stockport - Altrincham service) whose timetable is devised to account for hordes of kids attending the local school, and hordes of students attending the local college. Because of this, I avoid this route during term-time and only use it during school holidays, as I have a wholly unreasonable aversion to other people's kids screaming and shouting and behaving as if they're auditioning for a remake of "Lord of the flies".

Outside term-time, this service loses two-thirds of its trade, and consequently moves faster than the timetable allows for. I work in the Wythenshawe Park area, and just before the stop where I get off, there is a great big driver-friendly layby bus-stop bay sort of thing, which is ideal for the driver who is way ahead of schedule to sit and lurk for an indefinite length of time, so as to get back on time again.

So this is where I get delayed in the mornings.... ah well, the price I pay for a brat-free stress-free two-thirds empty ride to work during the school holidays, I suppose!