The Carpool

I just realized the significance of the empty halls in the lab. Four very particular co-workers are missing, at least for a while. Ventsi has gone back to Bulgaria for the summer, Tomas with wife Ariana to Prague, Per-Oskar is somewhere on vacation and poor Uwe's vacation request has been denied and he's been sent to Solibro in Thalheim, Germany where he's probably the most important person right now to get high efficiency solar modules coming off the production line there. But I'm rubbing my hands with glee. Why? These four co-workers are also the other four members in our carpool. With no one here but me, the car is all mine!

I should explain a bit about how our carpool works. The five of us all bicycle as our main means of transportation but we jointly own a car, the red Skoda Octavia in the pic. In reality Per-Oskar is the official owner having been chosen because he was the one able to get the cheapest car insurance despite being the youngest at 27. He's also the only Swede (hmmm... this couldn't possibly be correlated to getting a good deal on insurance, could it?).

The way it works is fairly simple. We maintain a group on yahoo where we can book the car as needed. We have no quotas since any conflicts are easily resolved by a trip down the hall at the lab. In the car we keep a journal of our driving and we pay 16 crowns per mil (this is Swedish for 10 kilometers). Gasoline is paid for with credit cards drawn on the carpool bank account which is maintained by P-O. Then we share all other car costs such as maintenance, insurance and the very expensive Uppsala parking which allows us to park at the lab - you didn't think that employees were allowed to drive to work and park in the lot for free, did you? The two car keys are kept in my office to which everyone has their own key.

The car's upkeep is shared, of course. Tomas and Uwe are particularly good at fixing things on it. Tomas is actually not the official member having given that honor to Ariana. He's also very willing to let her do all the driving but I believe this is due to the fact that he has no license and has never, in fact, learned to drive. When it's been time to change summer/winter tires I have always managed to get out of helping by offering to cook dinner for the other members. Tire changing happens at my house since I store the tires there. P-O handles the book keeping and gets us to pay up whenever the account becomes empty. A quick look at the log book reveals that in the first six months of this year the car has been driven 6800 km. So, on average we've each driven 6800/5 = 1360 km. In reality, we're often teaming up with each other when we go shopping or go on weekend trips since we're friends and not just carpoolers.

Now that I've gleefully used the car all week for my 5.5 km commute, I'm realizing that I very much miss my bicycle. I'm now starting my fifth year as a carpooler and have become entirely used to bicycling in all kinds of weather. When the weather gets too extreme - my personal temperature limit is -15C in winter - there's usually, but not always, a bus. Otherwise a quick call to a fellow pooler to come rescue me from someplace usually solves the problem.