There was this one particular evening where everything, including myself, looked gloomy the way things should do through the eyes of a student after 6 hours of classes. I was tired. My hair was out of place, and my flipflops weren’t made for running especially, not in the rain, and of course, it was raining. I said goodbye to my friends, ran out of the building, and straight to the CU pop-bus stop. When I got there my eyes went wide. It was like standing in front of a mirror with multiple reflections. I could see myself in everyone, empty eyes, bags in one hand iPad in the other. We were lost in our thoughts using our phones and headphones as a wall, shielding us from the outside world. When the bus stopped in front of us, we got on the bus without breaking the wall. We didn’t think, we just moved along. 

            “Good Evening! Come on! It is raining! Hurry!” Red code alert, there was a trespasser. The driver was breaking our wall by giving us a pep talk. 

            “You should move inside so your friends can get in,” he said cheerily. Friends? They are not my friends. OK, we look like zombies from the same lab, but we are not friends. Do I really have to move inside, and risk being squished between people and their bags to let those strangers in? THIS IS CRAZY.

            When it was my turn to get on the bus, he said, “Flipflops are the worst type of shoes to wear. Where is the protection or support in those plastic things?” I don’t know if the driver was talking specifically to me since almost everyone there was wearing flipflops, but I felt attacked anyway. I knew my shoes were not ideal but was that comment really necessary?

            “The traffic is so bad today,” the driver complained. My wall was shattering under the verbal assault, and I believed the others felt the same.

            “People these days are just…” The driver rambled on. I heard him but I didn’t listen. I tried to rebuild my wall brick by brick, increasing the sound level one by one. But at one point, I just didn’t have enough strength to finish stacking. He just wouldn’t stop, and all that talking destroyed my wall, completely. The comfort zone in my tiny little world collided with reality. I wanted to put my bags down. I wanted to get off the bus. I wanted the driver to stop talking. But none of that happened. Bombarded by the noise and my thoughts, I just stood in the bus for what felt like an eternity. When we were about to reach my stop, I hurried to the front door, preparing to sprint off when it opened. But I before I could do that, the driver spoke again, directly to me this time, 

“Have a nice day!” 

            It was a phrase I didn’t know I needed to hear. It was a phrase so simple we all stop saying it. I didn’t even say it back to him, maybe because somewhere inside me I still wanted to hit the driver with “the useless plastic shoes”.  

I didn’t think so much about that small interaction as I walked to the sky train. Onboard, the driver was nowhere to be seen. I didn’t hear a single complaint. The speakers whispered the station name with the voice of a famous actress along with some advertising jingle. I quickly went back behind my wall, and I thought to myself.

‘This is how it should be’

            That serene moment lasted for about a split second before unexpected thoughts flooded in. 

I couldn’t stop thinking about the bus driver, about what if we replace him with a self-driving bus so there was no pep talk. I couldn’t stop thinking about how talking to his passengers might be the thing that he looked forward to every day of the work, or how that pep talk might be what someone needed to get through a rough morning, and, or importantly, about how human interactions made me feel frustrated and annoyed when they are what so many of us are trying to salvage in the world of self-driving cars and recorded announcement.