So today’s was definitely my creepiest bus trip home in quite a while. Sometimes I get on the bus and know instantly that the driver is going to be, ummm, a handful. Today was one of those days. And I was right…
Through the whole lurching trip, she was having really loud conversations. With someone. Someone who either wasn’t there or had mastered invisibility. I didn’t see any evidence of a cell phone either, not that I would have felt much better about the state of affairs if there had been one…
About every third stop, she would yell “Who rang the bell? Where’s the stop?”. I can understand this, sort of. Maybe she wasn’t familiar with the route. This wasn’t really a stretch considering she also didn’t seem very familiar with how to drive a bus to begin with…
By the time we hit First and Harrison, she was engaged in a shouting match with another motorist. It went on and on. I thought she was going to ram the bus into his car, but she settled for the last word, calling him a “dummy” and adding “yeah, you know you are”…
She had trouble finding a couple more stops before getting to mine which, of course, she also bypassed. After the four of us who’d mistakenly assumed we’d be getting off the bus yelled “stop”, she told us to “please let me drive the bus” and informed us that there was another bus behind her, so she couldn’t stop in the designated zone. Funny, that hadn’t stopped any other bus I’d ever been on (nor had it stopped her at the preceding stop; she’d just come to grinding halt in the middle of the street)…
Anyway, we finally all exited the bus from hell. I stifled the urge to respond that I’d have been more than happy to “let her drive the bus” if she’d shown any particular skill at it. I just wrote down her bus number and dialed up the complaint line when I got home…
Knowing how Muni works, she’ll probably get a commendation rather than a mandatory crack test, but I did my part…