You’re surrounded by people. Everywhere you look, there is someone pushed up against you, trying also to struggle against the crowd; it’s like a bunch of fish in a net, trying to escape. People are pushing, shoving, yelling, and knocking people over to get ahead. You desperately try to move to the front of the crowd, elbowing multiple people in the side on the way. All of your efforts are futile. You sit broken, battered, and angry as you are forced even further back to the crowd.

No, I am not talking about some wild, angry mob or a group of prepubescent girls at a Justin Bieber concert. I am talking about the line to get onto the bus to get to class. With 14,000 bikes on the UC Santa Barbara campus, you’d think not one soul would be taking the bus, but it seems as if those 14,000 people somehow left their bikes to rust on campus. Of course, it is way more convenient to take the bus to class, especially if you have been exiled to the remote off-campus housing (which, by chance, also holds all the freshmen who still go to class.)

Taking the bus, however, is no convenient feat; it might as well be a free ride to Disneyland with how desperate everyone is to get onto it. The biggest struggle of all is beating all of the people to the front of the line. You can get there twenty minutes before your bus comes, and some student will come two minutes before and cut you. It’s the lunch line in middle school all over again. Didn’t anyone ever teach these children that cutting is extremely impolite? Even if you get to the front of the line by the grace of God, you may be confronted by the saltiest human being you’ll ever meet: the bus driver. For some reason, even with the giant mass of students who use the bus system, the driver only allows a small, random number (like six or four) to ride the bus. They always fire some lame excuse like, “We have more students to pick up,” and slam the door in your face. I swear, they wish they could peel out and leave you in the dust. My friends and I have experienced, on multiple occasions, bus drivers who won’t take extra students, even if they have a midterm. One bus driver even so graciously replied, “Maybe you should have gotten up earlier,” because, yes, taking the 9:02 a.m. bus for a 9:30 a.m. midterm is pushing it.

All salt aside, taking the bus can be a blessing in disguise. I’ve been so tired that I couldn’t even imagine biking a mile to my dorm, and the bus has been my savior. I’ve also had a bus driver who ranted to me about the other drivers like he was a catty girl in high school. I’ve made friends on the bus and have run into people I haven’t had the chance to catch up with. The bus may be a pain in the butt to catch, you may have to punch a couple of people to get a seat, and you may have to deal with angry bus drivers, but it is way better than hauling your butt to your 8 a.m on a beach cruiser.