Yesterday morning my commute was humorously disastrous. I had three meetings scheduled for the day, the first of which was set to begin at at 8:30am. I found the meeting location on my map, determined it was about 25 minutes away, and left the apartment at 7:40am, leaving a little room for error.
I flagged down a tuk tuk driver, showed him where we were going, negotiated a price, and then was on my way. By 8:00am, we appeared to be within a half mile of the office, so I was feeling pretty good. I even started looking around to see if there was a nearby cafe so I could relax and read for the spare 20 minutes.
And then things went horribly wrong. I saw we overshot the last turn when we hit an intersection that was beyond the office, so I asked the driver to turn around so we could try and find the correct street, street “12b”. We found streets 4a and 4b, and even street 16, but there were no signs for any other turn. Some were paved and some weren’t, so it wasn’t even clear which streets should have had proper names. I figured 12b should be just 4 streets over from street 16, but then again there only appeared to be about 10 streets intersecting with the road, so I wasn’t too confident. We tried it anyway, with no luck, then turned around.
At this point it was 8:25am, and I tried calling my contact to see if we could get some help. Conveniently, my phone wasn’t working, so we decided to ask some other drivers if they knew street 12b. I should add that my tuk tuk driver spoke next to no English, and neither did the any of the others we found. Each time we’d ask someone, the exact same thing happened: they’d motion for me to take out a map, they’d spend about 5 minutes spinning the map in circles trying to find our current location, then they’d conclude that the notion of a street 12b didn’t make any sense. We did this about 4-5 times, trying random streets in between, each time killing 10-15 minutes.
It was now almost 9:30am, and my phone still didn’t work.
Then we tried another random street, but it turned into a bit of a maze, and the driver got lost. He made one too many turns, and it took him about 20 minutes to get back to where we’d been. I didn’t blame him for a second. I would’ve gotten lost too. We were in this together.
Finally at 9:50, I got my phone working, and had the receptionist at the office talk with the driver. Problem solved! She told him where to go, and apparently the map was wrong. We started to head over, and then – no joke – the chain on the tuk tuk’s motor bike snapped. The driver then proceeded to haul the vehicle about 50 meters to a motor bike repairman standing on a street corner (apparently this is a pretty common problem).
He then took the chain off, and built a charcoal fire to heat up the metal so he could do his thing:
This whole episode took another 20 minutes, the driver paid the repairman, and then finally we made our way to the office. I walked in at about 10:35am, more two hours late, and nearly three hours after I left the apartment. Luckily, everyone was understanding, and all was good.
