Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Diary of a Bus Bum, Part 2


Previously, on ICNOCHYW...

In Part 1, we established that travelling by public transit was a convenient, cheap and hellish mode of transportation, but on the other hand, it provided me with humorous stories to share with people so that they'll like me. We were introduced to Shaggy the Incredible Stumbling Man, and his amazing ability to stop moving buses by flinging himself under the front tire. In Part 2, we discover that the best place in the world to be should there ever be a worldwide invasion by zombie snipers is inside a bus...

A couple of weeks ago, I had the most epically bad run of bus karma I have ever had in my life. The day started normally -- my alarm went off at 6:30am, I hit snooze until about 7:43am, then ran around like a chicken with a firecracker up it's ass trying to get ready for work in only 15 minutes. Well, that's normal for me. You people who actually get up with your alarms at ungodly hours of the morning are freaks. Anyway, I managed to get cleaned up and dressed and out the door in time for my bus. In fact, I saw it heading towards me as I exited my building, so I was able to perform what I call the Bus Stop Boogie -- running like a maniac, flailing your arms wildly in hopes that the bus driver will see you coming, take pity on your pathetic self and let you on the bus like the benevolent soul we all like to believe bus drivers are deep down inside. So I'm running for the bus, performing (if I may say so myself) a particularly exquisite performance of the Bus Stop Boogie, and I can see another person getting on the bus. She's a tall girl, slender with straight blond hair just past her shoulders, wearing a skin-tight black dress with a decolletage so revealing that I can tell, even from up the street, that her navel is an innie, black wrist cuffs and torn fishnet stockings with black stiletto booties. As I run up the street towards the bus stop, she turns her head my way and our eyes lock for a split second. She's seen me! I'm saved! Even if the bus driver hasn't yet noticed me, she can tell him that someone is right behind her and he can pause for a minute like the benevolent soul he is so that I can --

Thunk. VROOOOMMM.

As I fumble for my bus pass about three steps from the bus, the driver shuts the door, checks his blind spot and pulls out into traffic. I run a few more steps before the situation sinks in. He...left me. He just left me there. I was two feet from the door and he ignored me and left me standing there! What a dick! And the other girl! Didn't the chick who shops at Skanks 'R' Us say anything to him?!? And if she did, why would he just take off?? These people are assholes!!

So I sit down in the bus shelter and fume and grumble and wish hateful, horrible things on these two people that I wouldn't know from a hole in the ground. Didn't make me feel better...

That same day, work finally ends (it happens occasionally) and I head for the good ol' bus stop. For the last month, I've been trying to avoid getting a particular bus driver on the way home and no matter what I do, no matter how early or late I leave work, I always seem to get him. I hate this jerk so much, he annoys the crap out of me. He's always late on his bus route and then has to speed like a freaking maniac through yellow-red lights to make the next bus stop. When he stops, he yells at people to hurry up and get on the bus, move it people, move it, HURRY DAMMIT! Inevitably, this technique fails to get him back on schedule and by the time we hit the last quarter of the route, he's making announcements to the passengers to exit the bus by the front entrance so he can pretty much let us off while the bus is still rolling. He wears a hearing aid and apparently this thing doesn't friggin' work, because more than once he's yelled at people for swearing at him when they didn't. The last time he did that, he yelled at a middle-aged business lady for saying the f-word at him (she hadn't) and the poor woman was mortified. She had to come onto the bus with everyone staring at her, thinking she was a foul-mouthed bitch, because this fucking moron won't take the time to get a decent hearing aid. She sat with me because I didn't stare at her...I was too busy rolling my eyes at the dinkus in the driver's seat. Considering how my day had started, I was pretty much convinced that I was going to get him on the way home, too. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had managed to get a completely different driver, one that was on time and didn't speed! Awesome!

But of course, that wouldn't last long...

We were about a third of the way into the route and I had plugged in my Zune so I could rock out while playing my DS, and I couldn't hear a thing. Which leads me to a digression, a tip for those who don't travel by public transit very often. My secret weapon for travelling by bus? Headphones. Seriously. They don't even have to be hooked up to anything. I have taken my earbuds along with me a number of times, stuck the end into my jacket pocket, plugged the buds into my ears and listened to nothing for the entire trip. Works like a charm. People won't bother you because you've got them on and are obviously (heh heh) listening to something and can't hear them, but if they don't get the hint and try talking to you anyway, you have a valid excuse for ignoring them completely. However, I highly suggest having a back up plan, just in case. Mine is a foreign accent, usually something undefinable, like ItaliaSpanApanese. If someone bothers me while I've got my buds in, I'll pull one out and say, "I sorry, you someting say?" They'll ask if I speak English and I'll shake my head looking all bashful and sorry and foreign. I recommend not choosing an immediately identifiable accent, in the event that that particular person actually speaks the language and begins to converse with you in your "native" language. And if you don't actually speak that language, your cover's completely blown.

Where was I? Oh yeah, senseless violence...

So I can't hear a damn thing, but at one of the bus stops, the driver suddenly stops the bus and announces something over the transit speaker. I pull my ear buds out just in time to hear him say something about a loud noise and is everyone okay? Everyone is just kinda like "whatever", so he starts up the bus and we head out again. At the next bus stop, he turns the bus off and gets out to do a walk-around inspection. Suddenly, he stops at the window right across from me and starts poking at a chip in the glass. I am totally confused. The driver gets back onto the bus and makes a call to the transit office and I can hear the words "gun" and "shot" and "bullet hole" and I can feel all of the blood in my body suddenly rush to my feet. Say what? Someone shot at us?? You freaking serious??? Sure enough, he gets off the phone, turns to us and says, "sorry, folks, but back at the last stop, someone shot at us, so I've had to call the police and we can't move the bus until they get here."

WTF?!?!

We all file off the bus to wait for the next one to come along and I wander over to where the driver is inspecting the hole.

"Did we really get shot at?" I ask him. "Yep," he answers, "looks like a high-powered BB gun. It almost went through the window, and this stuff is pretty strong. If he'd been standing a couple of feet closer, I think it may have gone right through!"

"Would've been a bad day for the person sitting on the other side!" I joke. He chuckles but raises his eyebrows at me, and I realize how incredibly stupid that sounded...I was the person sitting on the other side. It's official...I'm a dumbass.

So I'm thanking my lucky stars for short, slow-moving snipers and the next bus pulls up. We're all pretty much prepared for a full bus due to the circumstances, which, right there, makes for a crappy ride home. Then I look up as I run my bus pass through the reader...and it's him. That jerkhole driver that I've been trying to avoid and finally managed to succeed in doing so, until some stinking zombie shooter ruined my bus ride home. Fuck. Sure enough, he's running late, so we're flying around corners and running yellow lights, and I'm holding onto the holy-shit handles for all I'm worth and trying with every fibre of my being to not go flying into the lap of the little old lady sitting in front of me. She's small and adorable and looks extremely fragile, and I've had just about enough of having to wait for paramedics to come and do something paramedicy at my bus stop.

Finally, about halfway home, some seats clear out so I can sit down and get the feeling back into my fingers. More people get on and a very large woman plops down next to me...and she reeks. Holy crap, does she reek! She smells like a pile of athletic socks that have been soaked in brine and left to rot in the sun. I have to breathe through my mouth or I'm going to totally hurl all over her. I keep praying to every deity I can think of that the next stop will be hers, but she doesn't get off until four stops before mine. As soon as she gets up and gets off the bus, another lady sits next to me, and while she doesn't smell like the other woman, she also reeks. She's dipped herself in perfume, probably had it injected into her veins that morning just to make sure it lasted the whole day, and my head is really starting to pound at this point.

The driver doesn't have to yell at me to exit the bus from the front, I'm pretty much out the door before he's even got them completely open. As soon as I'm out in the fresh, clean air, I take a deeeeeep breath and dissolve into a coughing fit. Awesome. I finally get to my apartment -- thank god!! Home sweet home! I pet my cats, Penny and Smokes, drop my stuff on the floor and change into my jammies. I'm buttoning up my pj top when I hear a strange sound...

...huck...shlkuck...hac hac hac...blarfgh...

The hell?!

I walk out into the living room and see Penny sitting there, looking all sweet and cute and fluffy, with a big pile of cat vomit on the floor in front of her. Sonuva...

1 comment:

  1. penny's superior and sensitive nose probably got one whiff of the cancerous cocktail of scents clinging to your corpse when you walked in and the poor thing could simply not contain herself. hope you showered before going to bed. if not, i will next time expound on the microdroplets of stench and how they coat a surface until washed off. if you can smell those delectable little globules, guess what, they have become impregnated on your skin, in your hair and have happily barnacled themselves to your clothing. poor poor pennykins.

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