Travelling Hiccups

Today is Friday. It's 7.48pm and I'm now on Bus 27 with Calder. It'll take us one hour to get home from Changi Airport. What better time to blog about travelling hiccups. Two weeks ago, Calder started travelling independently to work and back home. It's a journey of more than one hour by bus and train. We used Find Hub to track him, and also a visual tracker. Find Hub is not always accurate, especially when Calder is underground. The visual tracker helps us see his environment real-time, but it keeps presenting connection issues. Unfortunately, today is one of those days we couldn't connect to Calder's visual tracker. He was supposed to reach home around 6.30pm to jog with Daddy before dinner. At 6.45pm, Find Hub showed that he was at Sengkang. I used the "Play Sound" option to alert Calder of incoming call and WhatsApp video-called him. He didn't talk, but I surmised from the screen that he was on a bus. If he was on a bus at Sengkang, it meant he had missed his Hougang bus stop and was on the way to Changi Airport. Maybe the bus was crowded on a Friday evening and shy to say Excuse Me, he didn't see a way out. It didn't help that Calder had recently taken to sitting all the way at the back of the bus. (But when we watched the video clip later, we saw that the bus was not crowded. So he might not have alighted because nobody else wanted to alight at the same stop. In other words, nobody pressed the bell and the bus didn't stop at our place. All this while, had he been relying on other commuters to make the bus stop for him?)

The big question: How to get him home? I packed his dinner (that I cooked) and took a cab to Changi Airport Terminal 3. Fortunately my cab was faster than his bus. While waiting for Calder, I finally had the peace of mind to pray - God, I really hope I don't have to go around looking for him. Help me please. Fortunately it is easy to see into a bus in the evening because the lights are on. I saw clearly that Calder was not on the first bus. Thank God, he was on the second bus that arrived. I went up the bus, informed the bus driver that I was looking for my son, and shouted across to Calder (as expected, he was sitting right at the back) to alight. He sure looked glad to see me. 7.34pm. He had been travelling for more than 2 hours. So I asked him to go to the toilet, then gave him his dinner. Now we're on Bus 27 heading home. (We reached home at 8.50pm - dinner had never tasted so good.)

This was the second hiccup actually. On Monday (four days ago), Calder's younger sister came home exclaiming that the train was super crowded. No wonder Calder reached home only at 8.12pm (nearly 2 hours late). Tracking him on Find Hub and watching the clip from his visual tracker, we pieced together his journey. He missed his Hougang mrt stop thrice. The first time, there were many commuters alighting at Hougang but he hesitated - maybe because he was afraid the train door would close on him. (Apparently he hadn't moved near the door at Serangoon station as trained.) So he went up and down the purple line (perhaps he was lulled by inertia not knowing when to take action), crossing the platform at Punggol then at HarbourFront until (I assume) nobody was blocking the door when the train reached Hougang. By then he had been on the train for three hours. His Dad went to find him at Hougang mrt, worried that the gantry may not open its door for him because he had been in there for more than 2 hours. Thereafter, his job coach tried to release him earlier to avoid the 6pm crowd. And he had no problem, until today. 

How do we prevent such hiccups again? Teach him to press the bus bell at a certain part of the journey (I can understand the uncertainty as to when is the best time to press the bell. Usually he leaves it to me to do it. Recently I saw that he tried pressing right before alighting - definitely too late.) Train him to sit near the door on the bus (so he won't be blocked by commuters when it's time to alight)? Not easy to change his habits. Let him walk home instead of taking a bus from the nearby mrt station? The Dad is worried about him crossing roads. Let him wear the SMRT new tag that says "Please alert me when I am approaching my stop"? But he's already wearing a lanyard showing his disability transport card on one side and my contact particulars on the other. Wouldn't adding more cards (the SMRT tag comes in 2 pieces, one side to write where to alight) make it harder for him to tap his transport card? The visual tracker had also shown Calder playing at lifts (pressing the button and going to another lift to do the same , returning to the same lift to take it again) instead of following his training procedure. Give him a watch so he'd know not to be late for work? But he has dry skin around his wrists and may discard the watch en route.

Teaching Calder to travel independently is not straightforward after all. There are many variables that can go amiss and it has landed him in unexpected situations. It has also tested his parents' resilience circumventing all sorts of obstructions and strategizing ways to rescue him time and again. May God give us wisdom in this endeavor and protect Calder as he figures his way around the transport system in Singapore.