For those of you that don’t live in the United States of America (or for those Americans that live under a rock), the NFL Superbowl was on today, the Green Bay Packers vs. Pittsburgh Steelers. As you may or may not know, I’m currently a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which is the home state of the Green Bay Packers.

Sure, it’s awesome and all that a local football team went to the Superbowl, the largest American football event in the nation. And sure, it’s awesome that they ended up winning. But the only problem is, Madison residents are too dedicated to American football that everyone went outside and started clogging up the streets.

If you don’t know already, I work at the Badger Herald, the newspaper for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We publish an issue on Monday, which means I have to go to work on Sunday night. Because the Badger Herald office is about 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers) away from my apartment, I take the bus. If you’ve been keeping up with my YouTube vlogs lately, you know that I have tons of issues with getting to and back from the office, and with buses in general.

The bus system in Madison is also particularly unreliable, especially the free bus routes. I try my best to take paid bus routes because I have a bus pass that lets me ride all Madison Metro routes for free. The only problem is, sometimes the times don’t work out very well and I end up having to take the free routes.

These free routes are usually very off time – they can be ten minutes early one round, then suddenly be fifteen minutes late the next round. I had set a personal record for waiting for the bus a few months back, where I had to wait about 32 minutes for the bus to come. I had a feeling that the bus just skipped a round because it was too late or something. Today, I beat my personal record.

Remember the American football fanatics I mentioned a while ago? These fanatics flooded the streets and clogged up a very important street called State St. Just about every bus route that I take that leads to the office passes through State St. I wasn’t there to witness it myself, but apparently, State St. was so packed that people could barely get through, let alone vehicles or buses.

I had no idea this was the case and waited for the bus, expecting it to be on time.

Forty-three minutes later, the bus came.

The bus route that I was waiting for is essentially a bus that goes around repeatedly in a circle for several hours, with each round (or “circle”) taking 30 minutes to complete. My having to wait 43 minutes implies that the bus must have randomly just given up on a route.

I can sort of picture the bus driver looking at the crowd in State St., sighing with a depressed look on his face, and just stopping the bus to wait for people to go away.

But the story doesn’t end there.

Even while I’m at the office, I constantly check the Madison Metro website in case there are emergency route terminations. I noticed that the last round for the bus route I was riding was at 11:46 PM, which is two hours earlier than the normal last round. I suspected that they just decided to end the routes early because of the massive crowd in State St., so I quickly packed everything up and left work early so I could catch the bus back to my apartment.

On the way back, I noticed that State St. was almost entirely empty of football fans. When I got back to my apartment, I checked the website and noticed that the remainder of the rounds were put back in service.

Apparently they thought it would be a good idea to update the website ten minutes after I left.

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 10

Number of times I did my own laundry: 1