Back to the office bus

In the month of December, I started using the local EMU services to commute to the office. The experiences have been fairly well chronicled in my blog and this post sums up my position after I switched to the train.

But from the 1st of this month, I have returned to my office bus. The reasons were manifold and primary amongst them were these 2:
1. I was reaching office at least 30-40 minutes later than what I am normally accustomed to. This in effect stretched my day and also, with an increasing frequency of calls starting at around 8 AM, it was getting difficult for me to board the later trains. Catching the earlier train actually meant that I had to leave home at around the same time that I used to leave while using the office bus. And factoring the wait times at the station, the time it takes after alighting and then boarding our company shuttle service and the time it takes for this shuttle to reach the office, I was easily wasting 30 minutes.
All these months, I didn't have much of an issue with that since I didn't have any early morning conference calls to take. But with few of my projects running out of the EST and CST of USA, I no longer have the luxury of escaping early morning calls.
2. Auto: While I did book an auto to take me to the station every morning for a fixed rate of Rs.80 per day, I didn't have any such luxury for the evening. This meant haggling every day with some punk who would first ask Rs.150 and would then settle for Rs.80! And the other aspect was that the morning dude was running up a big tab with me in terms of advance. This advance never depreciated below the 200 rupee mark and even now, the guy actually owes me some 300 bucks or so.

And then there was third factor of where I am going to be working from. I have to spend at least 1-2 days a week in the office closer to my home. And I would also have to spend 2-3 days a month in Hyderabad too.

So taking all things into consideration, I decided to try the bus option once again. So far, I have had no issues in the morning trips. I invariably sit alone and have shared the seat on only 2 days when my good friends came by that bus. But the evenings have been a different story. It is clear that unless I take the bus that leaves office at 5.20, I am going to spend 2 hours on the road minimum. But for the same reason, there are lot of people taking the 5.20 bus and if a bus is crowded then someone is going to be pressing against me. And with my luck, it is the biggest and sweatiest person on that route whose stop is at least 10 stops beyond mine.

Let me see how long this option is gonna continue.