Tired of it

Elliott sprinted from the 33 around the corner so he could catch the 24. "Damn!" he cursed, just missing the bus that was pulling away, up the hill. He looked at the sign. Next bus in 24 minutes. Twenty-four minutes? He'd never get home in time. And here it was, 5:30 in the evening. All the buses would be overfilled with sneezing and coughing worker bees who, just like him, were dead tired and wanted to get home. But unlike them, Elliott would have to work another four hours through the evening. He was dead tired of it all. The rushing, the expectations, the need for perfection.

Sure enough, he'd get home and there'd be ten or twenty e-mails, all wondering where he'd been since 4:00. So many people depending on him at work, so many expectations to be on call every goddamned minute of the day. "Why aren't you checking your e-mails at 4:45 in the afternoon, Elliott?" Lily would ask. Dear, sweet Lily, a lovely young woman of Chinese descent (how politically correct was that?) whose relentless search for perfection was making his life a constant hell. He adored the young woman ... very sweet and (thank God) without the incomprehensible foreign accent that made so many of his conversations with Asian and Eastern European co-workers an unendurably gut-wrenching experience. Why did they hire people who couldn't speak English clearly? But Liy, even if she spoke very nicely, was possessed of the nail-grinding, teeth-clenching need for perfection. And she was far too yong to realize that nothing in life, absolutely nothing, could ever approach perfection.

Yeah, he was dead tired of it all. Here he was, corner of 18th and Castro, waiting for the next 24. He looked at the sign -- it was now 35 minutes away. Thirty-five minutes? What had happened? Oh, this was the Muni. You wait for the bus, see the ticker decrement from 20 minutes to 15 minutes to 10 minutes to 5 minutes to 3 minutes to 1 minute ... and then hop all the way back up to 50 minutes. This time, it had just gone from 24 to 23 and then up to 35. Well, this sucked. The longer he had to wait, the more trouble he'd have with his night-owl co-workers. Didn't matter that Elliott had started work at 6:45 in the morning. They were working until 9:00 in the evening and they expected him to follow suit.

The hell with it, he thought. And then he eyed the boy diagonally across the street -- the hairy Italian in jeans and a white t-shirt, lounging against the street pole. He caught the man's eye. And crossed the street to seduce him. But the sign had lied; the bus was early, very early, too early. The 24 came out of nowhere and flattened him.