My brother posted a link on Facebook earlier about “mega-commuters” — a relatively small number of Americans (about 600,000) who travel more than 50 miles each way to get to work each day. He’s one of them.

Sounds hellish, doesn’t it? But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that bad.

I can’t make a claim to be a “mega-commuter” as the longest commute I’ve done on a daily basis was about 35 miles each way — I guess that makes me a kilo-commuter? — but that was plenty to potentially drive me insane. As it happened, it was the job itself I was doing at the time that did a much better job of driving me insane, but I digress; my distaste for the teaching profession and reluctance to return to it ever again is well-documented elsewhere on this blog. (In fact, it was my growing sense of discomfort at an ill-advised return to the profession that spurred me on to start writing on this ‘ere site every day in the first place, so I guess I can’t complain too much.)

No, believe it or not that’s actually sort of relevant, because my daily 70 mile round trip to get to and from work actually became something of a haven of calm amid the chaos of my professional existence. While I was in my car, no-one could “get” me. (Well, technically, I suppose they could; someone could have crashed into me and injured or killed me. But… oh, shush.) It was some time I had to myself to spend as I pleased… sort of, anyway — I mean, obviously I still had to do the driving bit.

Consequently, I found myself spending my commute doing things that I don’t really do any more as a “work from home” person. I listened to the radio. I listened to podcasts. I listened to a lot of music. I sometimes phoned people. (Hands-free, obviously.) I phoned people. Jesus Christ, I never do that now, largely because the telephone tends to fill me with an uncommonly-large amount of dread, but nope, the sheer tedium of driving down the M3 (or sometimes, for variety, the A31) every day was occasionally mitigated by actually talking to someone other than myself. But more often than not it was mitigated by listening to the radio or podcasts. I attribute the fact that I can tolerate (and even enjoy) Chris Moyles’ brand of comedy — something that it appears to be fashionable to hate — to the fact he accompanied me to work and made me laugh every morning through what turned out to be a very difficult period of my life. I’m not sure I would have stuck out a job that eventually pretty much gave me a nervous breakdown had I not had something like that to help me mentally prepare myself each morning. (Obviously ultimately it didn’t really work, but still.)

While it was nice to spend that zombified period of time driving in a straight line for about 50 minutes, the prospect of doing so every day isn’t really the sort of thing that makes you want to get out of bed each morning. You have to really like your job to be able to stick it out for longer than a few months. I somehow managed to convince myself to do it for a total of two and a bit years altogether — eventually I moved closer to the job that eventually saw me escaping the teaching profession, which is probably something I should have done sooner — but that commute was probably one of the contributing factors that made me come over all queer, as a grandmother might say.

Despite that, though, I do sort of miss it. I don’t have my own car at all any more — Andie and I share one, as I have no real need for my own now — and so long drives accompanied by the radio or podcasts are now an increasingly-distant, wistful memory for the most part.

Then I remember that I don’t have to get up before 6am any more and I don’t miss it nearly as much.