Being poor is relying on people who don’t give a damn about you.

Even when I was poor, I wasn't that poor. But I know this much to be true. When you don't have money, every institution you deal with sucks.

I flew to Portland last weekend, and to get back to Ann Arbor from DTW (Detroit's airport), I took the bus. Ann Arbor recently partnered with a private company to start Air Ride, an AA to DTW bus route. It costs $15 without a reservation. This is much cheaper than parking, and I was glad to take advantage of it.

I got to the stop just after the last bus left, so I had a little more than an hour to wait. There was one guy sitting in the bus stop shelter, and I sat with him for that hour as we waited for our buses. In the several sentences that we exchanged, I gathered that he was an airport employee, and he lived in Detroit. He seemed nice enough, and told me that I was at the right spot. He also gave some bus route information to a couple of other people looking for the right buses.

Anyway, he was there when I got there, and more than an hour later, he was still waiting for his bus to get back home when mine arrived. His bus was late. His shift must have ended two hours prior.

As my new Air Ride bus pulled up, he commented: "Look at your bus. It doesn't even make a sound, and you don't have more than 50 feet to walk to it." He didn't say this in a friendly or joking manner. I didn't feel judged, but it was only then that it struck me that this guy had been waiting for a couple of hours for his shitty, loud, always unreliable, bus back to Detroit.

Once I paid by swiping my credit card on the driver's iPad, he handed me a bottle of water out of a cooler behind his seat.