Bus drivers! Bloody bus drivers!! Why on earth it's taken me this long to get round to them beats me but to Grantham they must go - the whole bloody lot of them!
This particular rant is brought to you courtesy of my journey home this evening. Let me explain. I had to drop my car - aka The Wardrobe - off at the garage for essential, running repairs, namely the front windows won't unwind and the windscreen wipers don't work. The garage is in Tiny Town East, about four miles and a 20 minute journey away from Small Town and Pither Towers.
I normally take a taxi from the garage when the car is in for work and that involves a £5 fare. Today I decided that I had to reduce my carbon footprint and so opted to get a bus home - or a "boozz", as it is known in these parts. I consequently hauled ass across Tiny Town East to its bus station and checked out where to stand to get a service to Small Town. I found the right stand and, after a wait of about ten minutes, a bus with "Small Town" emblazoned on the front duly arrived. I got on said bus, just as the driver was fiddling with his computer keyboard and I heard a disconcerting whirring which I assumed was the destination display on the front of the bus. "This is going to Small Town, isn't it?" I enquired, somewhat nervously. "Yeah", the driver muttered.
Anyway, having been on the road for about half an hour, I began to realise that all was not well. Then I began to spot unfamiliar signs along the route. The most unfamiliar of which was the bus station of Very Small Town East - a good 12 miles from Small Town and eight miles further away from it than I had started! On arrival, I not surprisingly enquired of the driver: "I thought you said this was going to Small Town?" His reply? "It is. From here!!"
Turns out, the bus I had been on had been on its way back from Small Town when I caught it and bound for Very Small Town East, from where it was timetabled to head back to Small Town. Strictly speaking, the driver had been telling the truth...........in the same way that Geoffrey Archer tells the truth.
Anyway, I ended up waiting half an hour for another bus to take me back to Small Town. Having checked and double checked which boozz I had to catch, I saw one pull up at the next stand with the correct destination posted but a different number alongside. What to do? No, they had caught me out before. The timetable said I was at the right stand and the service I wanted had a completely different number - I stood my ground. Then, the bus I had been trying to ignore pulled away from the neighbouring stand and, as it did so, the digital display board flicked over and it showed up the number of the service I had been waiting for all along!!! Shit and bollocks!!
I waited a further half an hour to hijack a bus which was going to Small Town and from there I had to get yet another connection to get home.
All in all, if I had been proud of my grandiose carbon footprint, it would have cost £5 and taken me about 20 minutes to get home from the garage. As it was, it took me about two and a half hours and cost me £4.20. Hardly worth saving me 80p or the world from distruction!
Sorry, as I said, bus drivers can go to Grantham.
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3 comments:
I've read that mental illness can be linked to a variety of causes - concentration of aluminium ions in the blood, childhood trauma, prolonged physical or social isolation, possession by demons and so forth - but nothing will get you dribbling and twitching into the psychiatric ward faster than using public transport. That's pretty ironic, really, because the useless, incompetent bastards always take fucking ages to get you anywhere else.
It ceases to be surprising that they're so crap, though, when you stop to think about it. I mean, can you imagine anybody with even half a brain and the tiniest scrap of talent in any direction at all actually choosing to be a bus driver? A mentally defective sloth on mogadon would display more initiative and a greater capacity for rationality than they do, on average (and be better looking and more stimulating company, come to that). Small wonder that bus drivers are such a bunch of miserable and unhelpful cunts - the knowledge that they're just the bottom feeders in the cesspool of public service must be a bit of a downer. That is, if such matters impinge at all on their dimly illuminated collective consciousness, which seems extremely doubtful.
I went to a pub quiz once where there was a team made up entirely of bus drivers, bizarrely. Fuck knows how they managed to find their way there; most of them seem perfectly capable of getting lost in their own back yard unless they've been trained to reflexively follow a pre-determined route by mindless repetition, like some lobotomised chimp in a laboratory maze. Anyway, they finished third, out of three teams (I think there were only two members in the team that came second; the landlord's whippet and a spider plant). One can only speculate on how a bunch of pissed up bus drivers got home - unless, of course, they drove their buses. I can't imagine any quantity of the beer served in that dump making much of a dent on their already minimal driving skills. Otherwise, I can just imagine the nine of them wandering about a deserted bus station well into the small hours, trying to remember what number route they needed and which stop to stand at to get back to their local health authority accommodation.
BGT
Should have got the 525.
... erm. I once got a bus from Birmingham to my old home town where I had to direct the driver back to the station because he'd only started the job the day before.
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