Eliza felt miserable, sitting at the bus stop, watching the rain falling non-stop from the sky. The wind was howling at the same time, which meant that whatever paltry cover the bus stop provided degraded from barely useful to nearly useless as the rain flew in through the sides, bypassing the roof, and smacking into her from one side. Her pastel floral sun dress was showing the tell-tale signs of starting to be soaked through, with the cream pastel turning into a yellowish gray at the parts where the rain drops had managed to evade the roof and the tiny umbrella that she was using to shield herself from the onslaught of the horizontal rain. She was glad that she hadn't given in to her impulse of wearing something daring underneath; at the rate in which the rain was pelting her, she would soon be providing a fancy show to any who were still crazy enough to be outdoors had she worn what she intended to wear before settling for something more sensible.
The rain came down mercilessly, and the wind decided to change its direction just for the hell of it. The tiny umbrella creaked under the change in wind direction, but Eliza managed to keep it from reversing itself by quickly moving it against the wind once more. This time round, the wind was blowing in rain along the long-side of the bus stop, which meant that there were fewer rain drops that were actually hitting Eliza. Along the road next to the bus stop, dare-devil drivers were still speeding along the roads as though they were racing drivers, with those nearer the divider actually driving through the puddles fast enough to cause a fantastic spray of water over the divider and on to the other side of the road. For that, Eliza was glad that bus stops were always located next to the slowest lanes of the road. However, she had seen drivers on that lane who did almost the exact same reckless and thoughtless thing and caused pedestrians to be drenched in odious road puddle splashes. She had been lucky so far, always close enough to observe the poor clueless pedestrian getting soaked to the skin, but far enough to be just out of the way of the offending driver's actions. But being at a bus stop had its distinct disadvantages of immobility, with the added effect of amplification through the redirection of the most energetic splashes by the roof back down to the ground. Eliza prayed silently that she would remain lucky and not have to deal with that.
The bus was taking a long time to arrive. She glanced at her watch to verify her gut feeling, and developed mixed feelings when she saw that she was correct and realised that the bus was indeed taking a long time to arrive. It was not exactly normal, but not altogether unexpected---the bus itself had a relatively high frequency for its route through the various neighbourhoods in the housing precinct, but it was prone to experiencing delays from choke points at different parts of the route, where a glut of commuters would board from roughly the same vicinity before alighting almost all at once at the same bus stop, roughly three to five stops later. This happened for at least two other parts of the leg to the bus stop that Eliza was on, and she had planned her time to coincide with the most likely arriving time of the bus that would guarantee her timeliness to work. Yet it was still getting late. Eliza started to wonder if something else had happened to the bus. There had been rare occasions where the bus itself experienced a break-down condition, causing a delay of at least twenty minutes, which was roughly the time for the next bus to actually arrive, after taking extra time to handle the added commuter load from the evacuation of the earlier bus.
As she kept on thinking and fighting against the rain, a familiar sight came along the bend in the road. It was the bus! Excitedly, Eliza flagged for it. The bus slowed down and stopped within the marked area and opened its doors. Eliza took a quick leap from the covered canopy of the bus stop and cleared the gap on to the bus, folding up her umbrella as she did so. The doors closed and she was soon on her way.
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