I’ve discovered a time investment fear disorder during my daily commute too and from work. My new office is actually closer to the south pole than it is to my apartment so the daily journey is one of the toughest aspects of my job (16 hour days are a cinch by comparison).

The commute has got all the more harder recently because the temperatures have started to soar and even the nightime temperature doesn’t dip much below the mid-30’s. Add to that, 85% humidity and you have yourself a free outdoor sauna.

In the evening my commute involves a 15 minute power walk to the station, with a laptop strapped to my back. The end result, as I stagger up the 40 steps to the platform can only be described as the drowned rat look. Marathon runners probably produce less sweat in a two half hour race that I do in that 15 minute walk. I then take a non-ac train to central Chennai where I disembark and my bus fear rises.

By this stage of the commute my hair has afro’ed out from the sweat and humidity, my shirt is sopping wet and my shoes are making scquelching noises because they’ve filled up with the sweat cascading down my legs. Frankly it’s a mystery why my girlfriend is still with me when she sees me like this.

There is an air conditioned bus that runs on the route I take. The catch is that it only runs once an hour and they don’t appear to run at a fixed time each hour. Given the sodden state I’m in by the time I need to catch the bus I’m longing for that little bit of luxury an a/c bus can bring. The problem is, I don’t know if it’s coming or already been because some days it will turn up at 6:20, others at 6:45 or sometimes it doesn’t turn up till gone 7.

Of course, there are plenty of regular buses I could take, but I think I’d rather have the back of my eyeballs scraped out with rusty razor blades than be rammed up against someone’s armpit in the suffocating heat.

And so, in an attempt to relieve the bus anxiety, I have taken to turning up at the bus stop as early as possible. I plonk myself on the seat, fire up Angry Birds and wait and wait and wait and wait for a bus. Will it come in the next 10 minutes? Will I have to wait 40 minutes? What if it doesn’t come at all? As the minutes go by, stress levels tick upwards.

At this point I should point out that in the last 4 months I’ve compiled what could possibly only be described as Chennai’s most comprehensive database of bus timings from my stop. Over the months I have been diligently noting down the times of every bus that I could take. Essentially I have found that this was a rather pointless task, given the traffic in Chennai, no bus can run to a schedule once it departs the bus station.

That said, I have discovered that 6 times out of 10, the A/C bus will turn up between 6:30 and 6:40. Occasionally it shows up much earlier, sometimes a bit later, or, with some depressing regularity, not turn up at all.

It is said that even the best financial traders fail to maximize their profits because of fear. A fear of missing out on the bigger rewards if they stay in the game just a bit longer. If these hot shot bankers came and stood at a bus stop in Chennai and waited for the A/C bus to come, then they’ll understand the true meaning of the fear of missing out.

The fear arises because the longer I’ve been standing there, the more time I’ve invested waiting for the A/C bus. As each passing normal bus goes by, my investment increases. As each bus passes that clearly has available seats, and I let it go on by, my stake has increased. I’ve given up the opportunity to get the normal bus in the fear of missing out on an even greater reward, or, in this case a pleasant A/C bus with comfy seats and where you are not being intimately acquainted with the arm pit of a stranger.

If I were to simply get on a normal bus now, all that time, all that sweat, that I’d invested would be in vain.

So how long is too long to wait? I know that more often than not, the A/C bus comes at 6:30ish. But what if it hasn’t come? What if it’s coming in the next 5 minutes? What if there was traffic at the start of the route? What if…I get on a normal bus, full of armpits, and the A/C bus rolls up just behind it?

These my friends and random readers, are the troubles that plague me on a daily basis and form the basis of my new theory on bus-time investment fear, but you can call it Bus Anxiety.