12. Budd Road

Previous - 11. A trivial return

Budd Road

While I was still in bed this morning I heard the radio news report of a break-in at an Apple Computer building on Budd Road in Cupertino, miles away from the main campus around De Anza. That took me back... twenty-six years in fact.

My first day working on the Apple HyperCard IIgs testing team, I rode the train to Sunnyvale and caught a bus to Cupertino. The bus dropped me on the other side of a suburban residential neighborhood from the Apple Campus, so I had to make my way through this typical California maze until I found my building: Valley Green 6 (the sixth apple building on Valley Green street.) About the first thing I had to do was go get an ID badge. These are the cards you use to open the automatic doors or to show the security people, when the entrance is manned.

To get my  badge, I had to go to a building on Budd Road. Of course they assumed I had a car. Getting to Budd meant walking down De Anza and then across on Stevens Creek. In places there were no sidewalks so I had to walk in the street. Just before Stevens Creek hit Budd, there was, if I recall correctly, an overpass over what wasn't yet a freeway (85). My recollection is that they had started work on this, made it as far south as Stevens Creek, and then stopped. They eventually completed 85 all the way to 101 (in both directions actually, which is a little confusing) and it's the best way to skirt the traffic in downtown San Jose when you're traveling either north or south. 

After getting my badge, I then had to walk back again and never had any reason to return to Budd. I assumed, what with all the Apple expansion on Infinite Loop and elsewhere, that the Budd buildings were a thing of the past. Apparently not.

Muni bus ride from hell

I try to avoid the 19 Polk bus and today's short ride reminded me why. I boarded in Polk Gulch, just as the bus entered the Tenderloin district. From that point on there were people in wheel chairs or pushing wheel chairs or pushing carts full of their junk using the bus lifts to board or exit the bus at every stop. Sometimes several of them. We were stuck at one stop for over 10 minutes as these people jostled each other exiting the bus so that a new wheeled group could board. This meant that all the ambulatory passengers had to use the rear door, where several of them also insisted on standing in the doorway. At the very back of the bus, near me, was a woman shouting that people should stop talking to her in her head.

Fortunately, my bus luck this morning has been otherwise great (for timing) so I was running ahead of schedule and now have some time to write this up as I'm waiting for my lunch appointment.

Next - 13. Architecture walk + The Sunflower