Bus Drivers on Thursday

I took sick leave from school for the first time in years this week.



On Thursday.

The grumpy morning idyll of the early morning (so early that it's dusky) journey to school was shattered by a bus driver of a vehicle that arrived late. He was a large and rather leathery kind of person with a jowly face, a little too big for his drivers' compartment, and that's all I remember of him in the half-light.

These were the circumstances.
1. I was the first of many on the bus. Everyone was crowding up behind me.
2. I had in my hands a small bag, my tapping wallet, my pencilbox and an open file. Remember, I have only two hands.
3. I was SLEEPY.

So I waved my wallet as best I could until I heard the required beep, before I moved on.

Then I hear this strange mangled roaring from behind me... a bastardised mixture of Chinese and dialect... and I turn around woozily to see his potato-shaped, lumpy, sagging face looming in the handy light of the driver's compartment cubicle.

Apparantly he wanted me to go back and tap again, just to make sure.

So while everyone else stood helplessly blocked at the entrance of the bus, I staggered backwards and touched my wallet to the machine, the wrong way round because I was sleepy, and then the right way round, until I heard another beep. Then I moved on again.

But NO that wasn't enough for Mister Bus Driver: the cretin demanded, in his incomprehensible garble, that I do it AGAIN. Utterly pissed by now, I slammed my wallet into the machine, which read


'EXIT OK'


And then he had the bloody balls to contrive to shout at me, yet again, in his barbarous manner. I was in no patient humour to decipher his pidgin slang, but he was in some way insisting that the first two times I had achieved my beeps on the card-reader machine was a sham. I stalked upstairs, by now in a mood thoroughly foul.

Why am I so angry? HERE is why.

I. The bus driver had no regard for the reasons why I might have been slightly sloppy in tapping the card. There was a crowd piling up at the doorway behind me, all trying to get in. And he automatically assumed that I was out to cheat him and his entire bus cumpany.

II. How much stuff was I carrying at the time? What kind of bus driver can't see silhouttes against a bloody neon-shining card-reader machine? He would probably have treated pregnant ladies or old dears the same way. The only difference would have been that if they'd bludgeoned him with tongue or handbag he would probably have shut up, but then I was in school uniform.

III. I walk in the full knowledge that I own a bus stamp, and may forget to tap any time I fucking well please.

IV. I really do loathe aggressive people.


At this point I might be called upon to consider mitigating circumstances in the darkly amusing behavour of His Majesty the Bus Driver. Why was he in such an asinine boor? He probably had family problems! (that's the one they always pull out first, right before the one about having a traumatized childhood.) He might be irritable because it was so early in the morning. He was probably so used to seeing students attempt to cheat their way past the paying system that he could afford to be an authoritative asinine boor on me.

On the other hand. I had a test to study for. His bus was late and he still had the corrugated intestines to be rude. I was laden and unwieldy and longing to sit down, and here he was, a jowly prig smug behind the partition around the drivers' cubicle, shouting in the most reprehensible excuse for a language, to which I had no way of replying or to even understand.

And if he was in no mood, neither was I.

My entire morning was ruined. I called twelve kinds of hell down on him before I staggered off to my Econs test. For the first time in my existence I was serious about it -- he has a choice between colon cancer, tubercolosis, and AIDS.



In other news, I just killed a mosquito by squashing it between my second and third fingers.
Poor mosquito.