Campfyre Stories

It’s only been one morning and already I miss my regular bus driver.

He’s a great guy, who sometimes puts on a crotchety attitude to get us all to work/school on time.

"Come on, come ON, let’s go, move it, move it, move it!"  He hurries people on and hurries people off because if he doesn’t, we’ll all be late, including him for when he changes from one route to another.

But he took the week off because the drivers are only allowed to take full weeks, not partial…  so we have a substitute…  and not the one I was hoping for.  This guy doesn’t seem to understand the discipline the passengers (on our route, specifically) require in order for him to run on time.

So he’d sit at a bus stop while the little old lady dug through the change in her purse trying to find a quarter…  and he’d wait around to…  I don’t know…  see if anyone else was coming?  And the end result of it was that we were TWENTY MINUTES LATE.  Which is unheard of for this route.

Even worse is that he is supposed to start a different route a full 5 minutes before my regular bus driver usually drops me off.  So he was actually 25 minutes late in moving to his other route.

Give me a hard-ass driver any day.  One who isn’t afraid to tell people to move faster when they’re slowing everything down.  One who will tell the people with the Nextel walkie-talkies to turn off that function on their bus.  One who will clearly explain that full-sized strollers (and similarly bulky items) need to be folded up and out of the way and if they’re not willing to NOT take up the aisle, they can get off and wait for another bus.

From experience, I can tell you, all those people who you’re catering to and think you’re making a good impression on?  Those are the ones who will take full advantage of you to the detriment of *everyone else*.  your regulars?  We’re the ones who crack up when you hurry people along or make them behave like civilized people.  We’re the ones who will applaud when you throw the beligerent drunk off the bus because he’s harassing us.  We’re the ones who appreciate that sort of thing…  and we’re the ones who will complain if we’re late every day.  We already do.

Maybe I should take this as a sign that this (short) week would be a good time to practice getting up that half-hour early to see how bad it will be when I switch jobs.  Even if that bus driver is running late, the worst case would be that he gets me to work *on time*.