Everyone talks about what the bus guy was doing but what about the driver? Drivers notice stuff like that. If a guy stands there and watches the bus pull away, the driver sees him in the mirror and it messes with their head a little. My uncle drove for years and he'd get ticked off at people who didn't even wave to stop the bus. He'd wonder all day if he missed somebody. So now this driver is gonna second guess himself every time he passes Maple Ave. The guy who missed the bus on purpose probably wasn't thinking about that at all.

Kept a streak going for about a year myself and it taught me the habit was actually about showing up, not about the number of days in a row. Miss a day and the streak breaks, but your habit doesn't, which is why I quit tracking streaks and just wrote when I had something. Three notebooks in 14 months with skipped days sounds like a solid habit to me, probably stronger than someone who scribbles a line a day just to keep a number alive. The pages are what count, not the calendar.