Kathryn's Inbox Exclusive: Commuter Shocked to Discover "Not In Service" is Not an Actual Suburb

A bus signed NOT IN SERVICE
turns from Jetty Road Glenelg
into Colley Tce
GLENELG, SOUTH AUSTRALIA--Local resident and regular patron on AdelaideMetro's extensive bus network, Mrs Mabel Hall, was disappointed earlier this week when she discovered NOT IN SERVICE was not, in fact, an actual suburb of Adelaide. "I just cannot understand it," Mrs Hall told one of our reporters in an exclusive interview. "I see buses going there all the time."

Mrs Hall's obsession with discovering the locality of NOT IN SERVICE began a week or so ago, when waiting at the bus stop in Moseley Street for the route 300 which services the stop at 30 minute intervals during the day, taking her from the popular precinct back to her home at the Lazy Breeze Retirement Village on Diagonal Road. The 300 service (which runs through a complicated circuit through Adelaide's inner suburbs that takes more than two and a half hours to complete,) on the morning in question was running approximately four minutes late. Which, according to Mrs Hill, was not good enough. "In the meantime, I saw at least half a dozen buses drive past my stop that said they were going to NOT IN SERVICE. And, just to add insult to injury, there was no one on there too, apart from the driver. When the 300 finally turned up, I had to ride with a woman with two screaming kids, someone on one of those awful mobility scooters that took forever getting on and off the bus and the man sitting in the seat behind me had the nerve to ask me for the time. I decided then and there that NOT IN SERVICE would be an ideal place for me to go and live, seeing as the public transport to that area is so good."

Upon making this decision, Mrs Hall approached several real estate agents and enquired about properties that were for sale or available to rent in the locality of NOT IN SERVICE only to be told that no such suburb existed. "I thought they were all pulling my leg and just wanted to sell off properties in crummier suburbs for more than they were worth, so I tried to find it for myself on a map." When Mrs Hall was unable to find such a locality within the pages of her UBD Street Directory, she started to become quite confused. "I was starting to wonder if the suburb simply did not exist, or if it was printed in the half of the street directory that my ex-husband got after the divorce," she sighs. Fortunately, however, when Mrs Hall visited the Moseley Street bus stop again, an answer was at hand. "All the NOT IN SERVICE buses were going past again. I remarked about it to a nice young man who was waiting at the stop with me. And he explained that NOT IN SERVICE was simply the sign that all the drivers put on the front of their bus when they had finished their run and were driving back to the bus depo. Who would have thought ..."

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