The words are from a Nora Jones tune (it’s on my iPod Shuffle, the one I commute with daily) and it’s actually about sleeping in, rather than getting up early. But I wasn’t actually listening to the iPod as I came to this scene at the corner of Oak Street and Sand Hill Road on my way to the Stock Farm Marguerite Shuttle stop this A.M. shortly after 7:20.
The rising sun, the ‘red’ left turn signal and a street lamp all glowed against the dawn sky as I made my way – early risers (and walkers) often find themselves with quiet, evocative moments like this. But enough right brain stuff.
We have been trying to use our left brain – you know, that analytical and calculating side – rather better. While preparing for back to work, I bought and have (and am still) working through the Get Things Done time management course (it’s inexpensive at $35, and seems to be as well thought of as anything else). One of the precepts of GTD is a trusted system that you can revisit when you need information.
So, voila, one of my trusted systems is this tag (seen above), attached to my commute bag and stored as a PDF on the CPUs I use. I can quickly figure out when I need to get going to hit a work deadline for arrival.
Twice now, however, I’ve noticed that leaving home at 7:20 for a 9:00 AM Adobe arrival gets me to the Stock Farm stop in time for a mystery, unlisted or ‘tweener’ B-Clockwise bus that rolls in around 7:42 and has made it to Palo Alto Station in time for the 7:58 train twice now, putting me at Adobe 20 minutes earlier than expected. It’s been great having 20 minutes extra to get coffee, start the email, review overnight stuff from India and Adobe’s other global outposts, check the tech news that may impact us, et al.
I tried to ask the driver about it, but he was having a problem logging his bus in this morning. Marguerite was having a systems problem, the dispatcher was concerned that my driver was showing 44 minutes late, and was giving him rapid-fire instructions involving getting his bus to the Palo Alto Transportation Center, turning off his GPS and then doing a full system re-boot – he didn’t have time to talk. So, maybe we’ll ask tomorrow…
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Crikey, I guess you know you’re in Sillicon Valley when even your *bus driver* is debugging things on your way to work
I didn’t even know his bus had a login… Wonder what happens if the system crashes? Bus stops….?