Does money talk? Part II

"A bribe is a charm to the one who gives it; wherever he turns, he succeeds." Proverbs 17:8

My school has two campuses. They are both on the southeast side of town, but the "old" campus is a ten minute walk from the longest pedestrian shopping street in the world (it's really just a huge mall), while the new campus is on a broken down country road, surrounded by factories and clay houses. I live on the old campus, but teach on the new campus so I have to take the commuter bus (like the orange line at ISU!) to and from the new campus 20 minutes each way.

It used to be that the bus turned south from the old campus and followed one of the major avenues until we reached the highway. At the highway, he'd turn east, ride the highway for about 5 minutes (like getting on HWY 30 in Ames) and get off at the road for our school, which was at an intersection with the highway. (No clover leaf on-ramps. It's a normal intersection; you just go for it.) But about two weeks ago, the road was closed. (I have a fun city-bus story involving that closed road, and if you want to hear it I'll tell it, but not today--the set up for this post is already taking too long...)

So now, the bus has to take one of those major avenues south of the highway and down the road a ways, the circle back around through what seem to me driveways for those big companies/factories that are out there, adding ten minutes to the drive.

On the way to class a couple days ago, I was reading my NT in English and the woman sitting next to me leaned over and said, "Excuse me, are you a foreign English teacher?"

"Yes."

"Oh. When you first got on the bus, I wasn't sure, but then I saw you were reading the book, and I thought, 'maybe'."

We talked a while about English major students versus non-major students and the difficulties in teaching large numbers of engineering students about adjectival word order. And then we came to that intersection between the highway and the avenue we were heading south on. And I asked, "Why is the road closed, do you know?"

She chuckled a bit and said, "Some people guess--and it's just a guess--that the locals that live on that street couldn't pay enough money to the government so they failed to keep it open. The reason we were all told is that it's not safe for the city road to intersect the highway. But I am sure it has something to do with money."

So yeah. Instead of a 20 minute commute to my new campus, I have a 30 minute commute because there are large piles of dirt and a guard rail at the intersection directly leading to my school. All because money (bribes) talks (bring success).

[For those of you who want to know what happened to that stand up stand talk to a stranger activity I did with my students, they complained the whole time that it was embarrassing and uncomfortable and that I didn't give them enough time. And when we did it again the next week, one girl hid in the curtains instead of participate in the activity. I found her and she was mortified to get caught. I told her, "You are more embarrassed now than you would have been if you had just done the activity." She agreed.]