Chapel Hill has a nice bus system. It's free and can get you about anywhere in town at a reasonable speed. I always thought it would be nice to have a job and a house on the bus route. You just walk out in the morning, get on the bus, ride to work and get off. Then you do the same thing again in the afternoon. You would have no worries about car payments or maintenance or traffic. You can read the paper or your Kindle or iPad and let someone else worry about getting you where you want to be. I've been paying for this nice bus system for a while and for a long time, I'd never taken advantage of it.
Recently, however, we changed where we get our autos serviced (the Volvo Dealership closed and the Honda dealership moved out of town) and because it's in Carrboro and on the bus route, I decided that when I take the cars in for service, rather than have someone follow me to take me back home, I can just take the bus. That way, I can get to know the bus service in case I find a job in town and I can let my wife sleep if I have to get the car in early.But the bus service isn't what this is about. It's about one of the bus drivers. On the last trip to the AutoLogic, I took the bus home and recognized the bus driver. I hadn't seen him about town for a while. His name is Felix Bloch. I think he's been quietly driving a bus in Chapel Hill for a number of years. Felix made the news back in the late 80's. He had a long career in the diplomatic service and maybe left in 1989 under what might be called suspicious circumstances. There were suspicions that he had worked both sides of the fence, but no charges were ever brought against him. Afterward, around 1993, he moved to Chapel Hill to avoid the limelight and took jobs as a bagboy/checkout guy at the Harris Teeter and as a city bus driver. He got caught shoplifting at the Harris Teeter and was fired from there. Apparently, he was loading up his car with groceries, gratis, each night after work. The Independent, a very liberal rag out of Durham, had a nice writeup on the whole affair back in 2001. You can read it here or you can read about him on Wikipedia here.
Here's a picture of Felix in court in 1995. I think he was answering to shoplifting charges.
Apparently, he hasn't tried to take a bus home with him and has managed to hang on to that job for around 16 or 17 years.
So all of this got me to thinking. How the hell is it that the Harris Teeter Grocery chain was able to catch this James Bond like guy when he was able to slip by the CIA and the FBI and a host of other federal agencies? Makes you wonder about government bureaucracies. Perhaps we should have Harris Teeter run the CIA and have the CIA sell groceries. I'm afraid I might worry less about national security and more about the quality of the deli meat.
