Every morning in fifth grade, Sam Mencimer climbed onto the 54 Metrobus from Takoma to L’Enfant Plaza on his way to school. By the time he got on, it was packed — standing room only — so he stood behind the yellow line, leaning forward to watch Joy Kenley drive. One day, his curiosity got the best of him. “What’s this button?” “Where do the buses come from?” “Which bus comes out of which garage?” he asked.
“He always had a smile and he always had a question for me every day, and I had an answer,” Kenley says.
Then one day, Kenley had an idea: she offered Mencimer a tour of the Northern Bus Garage. He jumped at the chance. Inside, he climbed into the driver’s seat, pushed some buttons, and got a firsthand look at the buses up close. Kenley showed him how to change the block destination signs and explained that the way to identify a bus wasn’t by its bus number, but by its block number in the lower window—that’s how Mencimer could always spot her bus: N503. She even let him change the block ID to read “SAM.”
“I was having the time of my life,” Mencimer says. “It was one of the coolest things I had ever done, and still probably is one of the coolest things. If I could go back and do the same tour again right now, I would.”
That tour stayed with him. Eleven years later, Mencimer is now a full-time Metro employee in the signal engineering department, still driven by the same curiosity about operations that started on those fifth-grade bus rides. “As a kid, I was always tinkering with stuff,” he says. “Messing around with electronics and mechanical things. So that was always kind of fitting.”
For a few years, Mencimer rode Kenley’s bus religiously. She would make sure to grab the bus with the block ID N503 so he could find it, and he says he would “sit out and look for it.” “Sometimes I let one or two buses pass by if they didn’t have the right block number,” Mencimer admits. “I’d say, ‘Nope, this isn’t N503, I can’t get on this bus.’ ”
When Metro cut the route back to Metro Center, Mencimer started taking the train to school instead of the bus. But his encounter with Kenley on the 54 Metrobus was never far from his mind.
After his sophomore year at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Mencimer discovered Metro’s internship program with the Department of Communications and Signaling. “When I saw the internship, my first thought was, ‘Wow, I get to work with all of these great people,’ ” he says. He spent two summers interning there, and after graduation, Metro hired him full-time.
Ever since he started working at Metro, Mencimer had been thinking about finding Kenley again. During his internship, he tried once, but she happened to be in training that day. When he came back full-time, he decided to try again. He looked her up in the company directory, confirmed her division, and asked around. Someone in rail transportation eventually shared her schedule.
Kenley remembers sitting at her desk at Glenmont Station when she heard a knock and called out, “How may I help you?”
“It’s Sam,” he said.
“I’m like, ‘oh no, not Sam,’ ” jokes Kenley, who is now a station manager. “I’m thinking, wow, you remembered me, and I remember you.”
Kenley says she was proud to see how far Mencimer has come. “To have an impact on his life, just doing my everyday job, you never know,” she says. “I gave a curious kid the information, and he took it and used it. And now look at him. He doesn’t have to stop here. He can do anything in Metro that he wants to do. He can be the CEO if he wants to. Dream big.”
Now, the two have each other’s phone numbers. “Don’t be a stranger,” Mencimer recalls Kenley telling him. “We are connected,” she says.
