MC's autonomous buses break traffic laws, Norise's cookie brand terminated

As the 2023-2024 school year kicked off, Mount Carmel faced an issue: morning buses were consistently arriving late. 

After several mornings where students had to make the mad dash to their lockers and first periods, along with parent complaints, MC was fed up and was going to find a solution to this issue. Following much consideration, the school administration decided that they needed to get self-driving bus technology from Elon Musk.

To do this the school needed to get in contact with Musk. In order to get his attention the school had Ms. Emma Norise’s  Tuesday afternoon last period class bake ten batches of her famous cookies in the science lab (under her expert supervision of course). 

Then the next day  during the faculty meeting in the morning the teachers held a game of “not it” to decide who would mail the batches to the Tesla headquarters in Austin, Texas. Oddly enough Ms. Norise lost the game of “not it,” so she sent and packed the cookies herself. 

“It’s almost as if she lost on purpose," said incredulously by geometry teacher Mr. Williams, “I was going to slip my new drum kit recording in the package in order to get Musk’s attention, so he could give me a shout out.”

  The next day during Studium students were asked to spam Musk’s  direct messages on X (formerly Twitter) in order to get his attention. After one student used several poop emojis and called Musk “a genius, sir,” the head of X responded, and he and the school agreed on a contract to retrofit the school buses with his autonomous self-driving technology. 

“I felt I owed it to Chicago after my great idea for a high-speed train from downtown to O’Hare Airport did not manifest,” said Musk.

The school’s administration was excited.“This is great for the school,” said Mr. Tabernacki, “because we get to solve our bus issues early into the school year, get more publicity for the school, and Musk gets a chance to test out his totally safe, mostly-finished self-driving vehicle technology”. 

Initially the self-driving buses were a success. Not a single student who took the school bus in the morning arrived late, and the publicity MC received once their deal Musk was covered by the local news was huge. Because of this publicity over 100 students applied to transfer to MC shortly after the news came out. 

“Last year we were barely able to field two teams,” said senior Jacob Ferguson of the varsity hockey team. “Maybe this year we’ll actually be able to recruit members in order to rest our players.”

However, the hype died down when it became known how the buses were getting the kids to school on time. As it turns out the way these autonomous buses had bested their human predecessors was simple. They had a complete disregard for the laws of the road. Early on Monday morning October 2nd a police report was received by the school concerning two MC school buses that were suspected of running two and three redlights respectively. Once CPD had the images clarified there was no denying the “HERE COMES THE CARAVAN” on the fronts of the buses. Neighbors in the community also reported that on more than one occasion the self-driving buses did not recognize dogs or small children in crosswalks, seriously endangering lives.

Before MC could call Musk to complain about this malfunction in the buses another call from CPD came in. Apparently, a MC bus was seen by several witnesses and a patrol cop swerving between lanes and for short bursts speeding well over the speed limit on DuSable Lake Shore Drive. MC denies all fault and vehemently assures the MC community  that no students or bystanders have been injured by any of these buses. Still, critics believe it would just be a matter of time before a tragedy occurred. 

Because of this MC terminated their $1.5 million contract with Musk and are currently recalling the one thousand pounds of “Auntie Norise’s Delight” cookies. Neither Musk nor TeslaX affiliates have commented on the malfunctions of their systems as of press time. 

“We were about to make it big”, said Ms. Norise, “the terms with Musk were almost agreed. Aunty Norise’s DelightX was about to hit Targets and Whole Foods across the country!” 

It turns out MC had been planning to pay for half of the contract by partnering with Musk to sell Ms. Norise's awesome cookies nationwide but has since decided not to with all the bad publicity the bus incidents had caused. 

With the autonomous bus deal falling through, and Ms. Norise’s rise to bakery industry dominance stopped before it was even started, MC administration reconvened and in the end decided to just move the morning bus pick-up times a little earlier.