Bus Drivers
Dear fucken bus drivers of London,
Fuck you.
Really.
Cheers
Jrod
I have had enough of these motherfuckers.
Let me tell you the story from the other day.
Was in Brixton with my family who were over for the wedding. We were waiting for a bus, and it is when of those places where all the buses go straight down Brixton Road, but the bus stops are 50 or so yards apart.
I see a bus go to the far stop, and I run down to catch it. My cousin and my father (two replacement knees, a shit back, and a bung hip) follow down behind me.
I jump on, and stand in the doorway so the guy can’t shut the bus doors.
He decides to shut them anyway, smashing my elbow and as he shuts them he starts driving off.
Not after he shuts them mind you, but as.
He drives all of 2 metres to the red light, doesn’t even get fully out of the bus lane, and stops.
I go up to his glass booth made of ivory.
“What are you doing, I have other people coming on.”
“I can’t open the doors now, it is against procedure.”
“Is it in the procedure to shut the door on someone standing there? They’re right at the door, just let them in.”
“Can’t at a red light.”
“Don’t give me that shit, when you shut the door on me you didn’t fucken care, just open it up and I’ll get off”
“I can’t, I’ll get in trouble”.
“And you won’t for fucking smashing my elbow.”
“I’ll let you off at the next stop.”
“We’re still at this fucking stop.”
“Regulations (inaudible mumbling).”
“Fuck off, look at my elbow.”
“There is noth…”
“Just fuck off you fucking arrogant cunt, sit in your fucking elitist booth and be a dickhead”.
Then I stormed down to the other exit, waited for the bus to leave the stop.
When I got to the next stop, the doors opened, and I slammed my other elbow onto the door as I left.
Then I remembered to call the two aussies who are new to London and were stuck in Brixton trying to work out what the fuck went on.
NOTE: Not all bus drivers are wankers in London. But too fucken many are.
The curb of death
London doesn’t have alot of space.
Especially inner London, and some things can’t be helped because of this.
One is how close the buses get to the curb.
It is scary close.
Due to my general hate of people, I like to stand walk as far away from them as possible.
This leads me to the curb.
And the curb leads me to almost getting hit by a bus daily.
I have no idea how I haven’t been killed yet, by all rights I could have died 15 times.
I must admit though, this near death experience does wake me up, i will be wandering along, thinking about how cricketers have sex, and suddenly there is a bright red double decker bus so close all my orifices open at once.
It’s not just me either, I have had the same conversation with other aussies, kiwis and saffas, all of us have been trapped to close to the curb and haf to duck the mirror and feared for our lives at times.
Buses are dangereous, even when no one is getting stabbed on them. Like the bus drivers back home, these drivers aren’t the safest drivers ever, I was on a bus that ran into a crane.
A big motherfucking crane, there was no way yoy couldn’t have seen it, IT WAS A BIG MOTHER FUCKING CRANE.
I was downstairs and towards the back and saw us getting pretty close, but the driver should have been warned by the girl screaming upstairs, but instead the big bang and the fact he was stuck was what struck a chord with him.
If bus drivers can be crap enough to run into big mother fucking cranes how can we trust them to not go 1 foot to the left jump the curb and kill all the anitpodes in sight?
We can’t.
But havening said that, if my choice is walkling closer to people, or death by bus, I might still roll the dice with the bus drivers.
public fascism
I decided on catching a bus back from trent bridge to Nottingham station.
Seemed like a simple and harmless exercise.
Wrong.
It led to humiliation and degradation.
How, I hear you cry dear reader, because I had assumed that I could buy a ticket on the bus for the bus.
An audacious move I agree, but not one that I thought would result in a bus driver saying correct change only.
But it wasn’t what he said, but how he said it.
It snaked out of his thin lips with a hatred of a hundred Born Again Christians “CORRECT CHANGE ONLY”.
But I heard,
“Who do you think you are mr fancy pants, I oughta smack the living shit out of you for having the balls to ask me for a ticket on my bus, that’s right my bus, without having the correct change, did you think you were in red china you pinky commo prick, is that your excuse for this shocking lack of respect, I mean you come on this bus, that I run, and you start off by insulting me, the bus company and Nottingham in general, in the old day I would have had your ass for this, I would have beaten you until your body was in its final twitches and then thrown you from the bus into an oncoming lorrie, you disgust me, now get out of my sight before I get angry.”
Instantly I knew that this was the place for a person like me, someone who was prejudiced against for having no change.
It was if I had a patch on my jacket a red cross through coins.
In Melbourne you can get change from bus drivers, and some of them are friendly.
Where as in my experience 100% of nottingham bus drivers are evil hate filled people.
The exchange took all of 2 seconds, but beneath the surface, in the subtext there was hatred, this face had inferred violence all over it, and a plastic security window couldn’t hide that.
So I got off the bus, with the offending £5 note burning through my hand.
Never have I been treated like this before, instantly I felt a bond with Danny Glover that went way beyond my love of Saw.
All I could next was go to the shop and get the correct fare £1.50, but I thought no, uhuh, this was not about change, this was about my place in society.
If I wanted to live in a coinless way, I shouldn’t be discriminated against, i had my beliefs, and I shouldn’t have to change them because the Nottingham Public Transport department thought I my way was wrong.
Instead I did what any coin hating person would have done, I caught a cab, which cost me £3.50, and let the cabbie keep the change.
I may have been unnecessarily £3.50 out of pocket, but my dignity was priceless.
And i was happy with my silent protest against the man.
double decker violence
When I first got to London every bus I rode on I got on top.
Not out of some romantic bullshit tourist crap, I did that years ago.
Because there are always seats available up there.
I told this to one of my friends in London, and he said yeah, that’s because everyone gets stabbed upstairs.
Now this still hasn’t stopped me from sitting up there, because I’ll be damned if I am standing for 30 minutes.
If I have to take the odd knife, I can live with that, or not, as the case may be.
What I have been told from a few Londoners is that the double decker is dying.
With all the stabby stabby, and the fact Londoners are just not sitting up top anymore the double decker is being phased out for long super buses with rubber middles.
Since I have no emotional or cultural bond to them, I don’t feel sad.
I do however like that something as simple as a few knife crimes can change a cultural landmark of a city.
Most Americans know nothing about London, but they know about the buses.
People often say revolutions are not possible in this day and age.
But if a few kids with swiss army knives can make this sort of difference, there is nothing we can’t do.
I just now need to work out what crimes will make the government invest in a plan to get air conditioning into the tube.
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