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a tale of woe (or, greyhound, we need to chat)
friday night was, um, different. i took the bus from Point A to Point B (Point A being where i live, Point B being where the manfriend lives, and said bus ride being about 3ish hours long, but still way better than me losing my mind in traffic). this is a bus ride i take twice a month, at least, for the past 3 months, and so i’m used to all the weirdnesses that happen on buses. specifically, greyhound buses. the worst is beyond this link, and the best is when nothing happens and the person next to me does not smell too strange. YAY bus.
pretty sure that friday’s bus trip is now my own personal worst bus experience. i’ve emailed greyhound, and i plan to call them tomorrow to make sure they hear me, but hey, this is a most excellent story, so i may as well tell it for all the internet to read.
as is to be expected, the bus did not leave Point A on time. typically, at the most, we leave 15 minutes late. in this case? 40. from what i could tell, this was because we were waiting until everyone was on board. everyone. which meant waiting for several people who showed up 40 minutes late. for whatever reason, anyone who had a green bag under the bus had to carry it. about 10 minutes before leaving, the driver boarded and said, “anyone have a green bag? you might want to get it before we leave without it” - and so they did. three guys left the bus and came back carrying various green luggage pieces.
also, the AC was busted and blowing this horrid canned air that was perfectly lukewarm. so before going, the driver opened those two random portal things on the roof of the bus. like a convertible, but not breezy at all.
we drove to our first stop, where a dozen or so people disembarked. well, if 12 people got off the bus, 13 got on, and one girl was told to stand in the aisle. until! the first absurd thing happened as we were pulling out of the bus stop. our driver got on the intercom and asked “is anyone going to place x?” - place x being 31 miles north of the current bus stop. one girl raised her hand and called “i am”. the driver’s reply was “you’re kidding. anyone going to place x?” - she repeated herself, and our driver, in a perfect falsetto, mocked her, then informed the rest of us that this is “what (he) has to put up with every day”. the girl was unceremoniously dumped back at the stop, and we left. i seriously hope someone came to pick her up and drive her the 31 miles home.
we got to the next stop, which is about 20 minutes from Point B, and this is, i kid you not, where people started crying. of the 47 people on the bus, most got off at this particular stop, and i’d say about a dozen of us were left on the bus. we started to leave the stop when the driver pulled back to the curb and jumped out to get several people on the bus - from what i could tell, they’d nearly been forgotten. as they boarded, one of them (an older woman) asked the driver a question i could not hear. his reply was paired with a look of astonishment: “i’m the driver, yeah, are you getting an attitude with me?”. she looked confused and said no, and he turned to the bus as a whole. “fine. y’all have questions? i can answer them now. what questions do you have for the driver? we won’t go anywhere until i’ve answered them all!”. one guy called out “come on, man, we’re running late!” (true, we were an hour behind schedule. and many people on board were trying to make a train leaving from Point B). the driver laughed and said “no, i’m not late, y’all are late” and seemed adamant that we really weren’t going anywhere. someone asked him if we could just go, to which he responded, “no, y’all don’t care about me, i’m not going anywhere until you show me you care”. one woman, who was openly crying (she needed to make that train, and we were all exhausted), informed him that she did not care, for one.
it was at this point that i asked him what his plans were after getting us to Point B. (exact words: “i’m not asking you out or anything, i’m just trying to take an interest”). he told me he had to “drove a busload of more people somewhere else”, then sat down and we started on our way. as we pulled into Point B, the driver came back on the intercom and said, “y’all better enjoy your visit, smile, be nice, because you’ve given your driver a lot of trouble. a lot of you were really late to the bus at Point A.” then, we pulled in, went on our way, and everyone trying to make that train most certainly missed it.
here’s the thing. i worked in retail for most of college, so i get how totally miserable customer service can be. i’ve dealt with every kind of idiot this planet can offer. so i get that a job as a bus driver cannot be the greatest job. it has to be tedious, and you probably deal with really irate people who fail to understand that traffic is beyond your control, or that you cannot fix the AC, or that your company has rules that interfere with something the passenger wants.
the thing to remember, with any job, is that sometimes you have a bad day. and when you do, it helps to be able to just suck it up and deal.
the entire experience was really, really strange. and while i am pretty sure that he was just having an exceptionally awful day, and people being late just tipped the scales for him, i’m still a bit pissed off.
so. YAY bus travel, and good gravy, i hope the next trip is less…insane.
to quote the manfriend, “how is it you always have the weirdest bus trips?”. truth.
