Spartan Daily - Serving San Jose State University since 1934

Issue date: 10/9/08 Section: Opinion

Things don't always go as planned.

Sometimes opportunities pop up, such as a friend getting free tickets to a one-man show in San Francisco at the last minute and needing someone to go with, which is what happened to me last week.

Sometimes adjustments need to be made to accommodate these spontaneous situations, such as staying awake at 2 a.m. to plan the trip with said friend for later that same day.

Sometimes organizing is involved, such as looking up the public transit routes and departure times that would allow us to make it to the show on time, printing out the schedules and even highlighting and color-coding the different possibilities.

Other times, though, one may face unexpected challenges.

Exhibit A: Taking advantage of our VTA stickers, we took the bus to the Fremont BART station. On the way to the BART station, the bus made a long stop at the side of the road. The bus driver was apparently waiting for someone.

Minutes ticked away until a highway patrol car pulled up and two officers came onto the bus. They commanded a man to get off the bus. Once off the bus, one officer proceeded to handcuff the man, while the other patted the guy down. An officer extracted a mysterious bottle from the suspect's pocket before taking him inside the patrol car.

Then there was Exhibit B: Because of that detour, we missed the direct BART line to the City and ended up having to catch two trains. We still thought that we could make it to the theater just before curtain call.

Big mistake.

Due to technical difficulties with the train ahead of us and with our own train, there were some more unplanned stops. The fact that the trains were packed and often had standing room only, not to mention there was a strong, distinct stench of not-so-legal substances in the air, did not help the situation.

Many of the passengers seemed to be heading off to LoveFest, a big parade and street festival revolving around dance music. One could tell they were headed for that purpose due to their colorful, eccentric outfits - or lack thereof.

Once we finally made it to the City by the Bay, it was already past the 2 p.m. showtime and we hadn't eaten lunch, so we got food-on-the-run (It's pretty sad when everything on the Burger King menu starts to look really good).

As we wandered around aimlessly before finally finding the theater, we were 30 minutes late to an unfamiliar show. Expectations were somewhat low for the rest of the trip (the code word was "tamales" if we wanted to leave the show early), but we went with the flow.

Things couldn't get any worse, right?

Things, in fact, actually began to pick up when the one-man show - or what we were able to actually watch - turned out to be much better than we had expected. "A Bronx Tale," the coming-of-age tale of a boy and the competing influences of his father and the local mobster, turned out to be pretty entertaining.

Afterwards, the spontaneous shopping to run errands (if you consider finding Halloween accessories an errand) made for a much happier ending.

OK, ultimately things didn't go exactly as planned, and so much for highlighted train routes. It's how you respond to unexpected problems, though, that matters.

Plus, the detours made for a more memorable trip.

Sometimes it's good to plan on not having any plans.

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