So let me tell you a little bit about my carpool. It's been a little more than three months, and I think there's enough for me to say even without breaking the "what's said in carpool stays in carpool" rule. I love the carpool, for a million reasons that I didn't expect. Saving gas is the least of it, as it turns out.
The structure of our carpool is a little unusual. The college has about 600 employees, who are clustered in the college town and in a few other places, like my small city 25 minutes south of the college. There are a couple of other carpools that go from my city to the college town, but ours is the biggest and the best. There are 9 of us in this carpool, but not everyone 'pools every day. Usually there's just one carload of us; occasionally we send two cars. We meet at a park-and-ride lot right near the highway between 7:45 and 7:50 AM, and aim to leave promptly at 7:50 AM. (Despite my best intentions, I am the chump who comes flying in at 7:49 AM or even sometimes as late as 7:51 AM, all apologies and dropping water bottles and travel mugs of coffee.) Who goes on which day and whose turn it is to drive is managed by our carpool captain, who sends an email out on Friday afternoon asking who's planning to participate on which days in the following week, and then checks his spreadsheet of who drove when and how many days each person has ridden, and sends out the driving/riding plan for the next week. He assures us it is not all that hard, but my mind always gets stuck wondering how he sorts out whose turn it is to drive from an erratic group of semi-regular participants. Luckily, I figure I don't really need to remember: I'll be there, with my car, each day, so if people get into my car I figure it's my turn, and if they are all expectantly waiting in somebody else's car I just jump in, apologize for being a minute late, and buckle up.
I really like the fact that it is not a door-to-door carpool. That helped me join -- when I was uncertain about the social dynamics of riding to work with strangers, I was relieved by that part. It lowered the sense of personal entanglement, and removed my fear that someone lingering over coffee or tardy getting out of the shower (probably me) would make a carload of people late. It keeps it a business relationship: we meet, we ride, and that's that. Conversations stop when we get to the park-and-ride lot, there's no polite idling in someone's driveway to hear the end of a story. The drive to and from the park and ride is the beginning and end of my working day.
The first best thing about carpool is that I now get to work on time, and leave on time, reliably. It's fantastic! The next best thing about carpool is that I laugh almost all the way to and from work. And oh, what I learn about the college. Almost every day someone sighs, and then says, is it okay if I vent a little bit? So those are the conversations where you learn how things work in other departments.