Hell is Other People on a Bus

Adapted with interpolations from a complaint letter sent to Greyhound on Monday, March 19, 2007

Complaint: I should have been on the 12:30 bus that just left Silver Spring for New York [on Friday, March 16], except that the following occurred.

I bought my ticket through your Web site and printed it out at the electronic kiosk at the Silver Spring station. The last time I had taken the bus to New York, I asked about whether I needed a boarding pass, since the station had required boarding passes for such travel before. Why a boarding pass is necessary when the tickets themselves have a "boarding number" on them is a mystery to me, but that had been the policy. However, at that time I was told that they were not using boarding passes.

Now it appears the station has reinstated this boarding pass policy. However, the only sign announcing this is right next to the ticket counter, at a height where anyone standing in line at the ticket counter will block it from view. The only way, in other words, that the sign will notify a traveler that he or she needs to go to the ticket counter is if the traveler is already in line at the ticket counter. No Greyhound employee verbally announced that we needed to get a separate boarding pass in addition to our tickets until one employee actually started lining people up.

I arrived an hour early for the bus per the Greyhound website's instructions. I was there substantially earlier than all but one or two of the people who ended up being able to board the 12:30 bus. Yet because I did not see this sign, I was forced to go to the very back of the line to board the 12:30 bus. I got my number and waited in this line.

Another customer got in line behind me, since just a couple minutes before 12:30 she had actually bought her ticket. (I had bought my ticket over a week in advance.) After we had all been lined up by one of the Greyhound employees, and had even begun the process of boarding, another Greyhound employee came to the back of the line and told everyone that we should just go out to the bus. The customer asked if we had to wait in line, and the Greyhound employee told her that we did not. This customer walked out and got a seat on the bus. There were seats on the bus for everyone in front of me. Because I actually waited in line after learning that this boarding-pass system had been reinstated, I was denied a seat on the bus that the customer ahead of me is sitting in right now as the bus goes to New York.

Interpolation:  The girl was the type of skinny distracted-looking brunette who spends all her time in any kind of static situation talking on her cell phone to people she presumes are riveted to the tiniest details of her fate. She told one of her telephonic correspondents that she had "definitely made" the 12:30 bus despite the fact that she was at the absolute back of the line. We had all been lined up in order, and she had seen the entire lining-up process. Then she saw her clearly specious opening, confirmed with the idiot Greyhound employee, and skedaddled.

The trip back departed from Port Authority, a full-size bus terminal with room for the patrons to line up at every gate. Here we had a classic line cutter: The skinny young woman with the gigantic backpack strolled up to the gate, walked to the back of the (long) line, walked back up to the front, asked someone about 10 people from the front if this was the correct gate, then just stood where she was, eyes focused up on the signboard. When the line started moving, she simply inserted herself, and there was no one around to tell her not to.

What in people lets them decide to do this kind of stuff? Do they think they're special, better than everyone around them? Or do they not even think about other people — rather, their own self-interest shines so brightly that it completely effaces everyone else's, as the sun makes the stars invisible? I'll never know. I both resent them, for mocking my efforts to follow the rules with their successful self-serving, and envy them for the fact that they garnered rewards for their blithe negligence.

Complaint: In conclusion, please:

1. Make the Silver Spring station post its weird policy about going to New York where people can actually see it when they enter the station, and also make them post it on the electronic ticket machine
2. Post on your web site that individual stations may have their own weird policies about boarding the bus and that you should always get your ticket from the ticket counter and never from the electronic ticket machine, because otherwise you'll miss those policies
3. Provide me with whatever compensation your policies allow for these wasted four hours

Thank you for your assistance.

•

I was able to board the 4:30 bus. It arrived late, likely due to the weather. The bus was also delayed somewhat as we began the trip, likely due to the weather. I do not blame Greyhound for either of these.

However, I do blame Greyhound for what ensued. We got into New Jersey before our driver realized at about 7:40 pm that he was about to have driven for longer than the U.S. Department of Transportation's 10-hour limit. I believe the driver could have alerted Greyhound to this circumstance earlier. Traffic had been bad all trip, and the driver could reasonably have guessed that this issue would come up and made better plans to address it than what ensued.

Instead, we drove back to Wilmington, ostensibly to pick up a driver who could take us to New York. When we arrived there, unfortunately, there was no such driver present. It would seem that the driver failed to confirm with Greyhound that a relief driver was available, resulting in wasted driving time, since we then had to proceed to Philadelphia. We left Wilmington at 8:30 pm, about 20 minutes before the bus had been scheduled to arrive in New York. Although we spent a few minutes at the Wilmington station, passengers were not given the opportunity to leave the bus to visit the restroom or purchase food.

We arrived in Philadelphia at 9:35 pm, about an hour after the bus had been scheduled to arrive in New York. A supervisor came on the bus and finally apologized for the inconvenience, without really explaining why this had happened. After a brief break, we left at 9:50 pm.

Interpolation: This narrative ignores, because it also cannot be blamed on Greyhound, the total odiousness of the bus's complement of passengers. This began to manifest itself from the beginning of the trip, as the woman sitting directly behind me disciplined her 2-year-old daughter for offenses such as speaking a little too loudly using the following techniques:

• Telling her to shut up
• Telling her, "You better shut up"
• Slapping her

But this odiousness reached a fevered pitch of repulsive behavior after we turned back to head for Wilmington, a pitch which was then somehow sustained, shrilly and profanely, for the next hour and a half.

In Wilmington, a passenger who I mentally nicknamed Incredibly Profane Woman sparked things by stating, at 8:30, that the bus had better get to New York by 8:50, because she had a train to catch. It eventually turned out that what she was referring to was a subway, which runs all night in NYC. That was the start of an increasingly silly but unceasingly shrill series of inventions, delivered from her rearward seat to the front of the bus with appropriate volume no less than once a minute for 90 solid minutes.

When we left Wilmington for Philly, everyone (including me) was pretty incensed, but she and Ethnic-Slur Guy took up the cudgels with loud shouted imprecations against the bus driver, almost all of which involved the word "fucking" used as an intensifying adjective or adverb.

First, IPW called Greyhound customer service and laid into the various people who answered the phone. Cursing at customer service people is, in my humble opinion, the most craven and gutless act of pseudo-rebellion available to a person, since the people on the other end of the phone are compelled by responsibility not to respond to you in kind, no matter how much you deserve it. IPW frequently requested a supervisor, a type of being she apparently thought could pick the bus up and put it in New York somehow. Even after supposedly securing a refund, she actually called the Greyhound people back twice (I knew this only because of her constant top-volume narration). ESG did the same thing, but in Spanish, delivering diatribes from which I think I learned some exotic foreign curses.

Then Horrendous Mother got on the phone and began cursing just as much at the Greyhound customer-service people, with her 2-year-old awake and listening beside her. At one point, she complained that we had not been allowed to disembark at the Wilmington station to get food, and she hadn't fed her daughter since 12:30 pm. To review, the bus left at 4:30 pm and was not originally due to arrive in NYC until 8:50 pm. I thought about calling child services, but decided (after much consideration) that there was a reasonable possibility that HM was lying.

When the phone-calling was done, IPW exhorted the rest of us to take up our cells as well. I might well have except that I was feeling deeply sympathetic to Greyhound's customer-service personnel at that point. When IPW invoked the Jet Blue passengers stranded on the tarmac for 11 hours, ESG earned his nickname by saying, "And it was a couple niggers complaining who did it [presumably, got them off the plane]! All those faggots sat around for 11 hours!"

Later, ESG began claiming loudly that he had "high blood tension" and needed to take his medication. His medication was at home in New York; he had not brought any on the bus with him. This was the cue for IPW to begin screaming at the bus driver, "We have a sick man here! You need to stop the fucking bus!" Later she ramped it up to "Hey Mr. Bus Driver, how are you going to live with a dead man on your conscience? What if it was your father? Or your son?" When one of the drivers came back to investigate, offering to have paramedics meet the bus in Philly, ESG merely said, "I don't feel so good, you know?"

During our trip to Philadelphia, IPW also said the following things:

• "There's government property on this bus! You're going to get in trouble with the government!" She meant that she was employed by the government.
• "Why didn't you stop and let people get food in Wilmington, Mr. Bus Driver? People need food! There are fucking kids on the bus!"
• "I'm gonna call the police and tell them this bus driver is kidnapping the bus!"
• [after clipping a curb] "Hey, why don't you learn how to drive the bus! I just hit my head! I got a migraine!"

It was after this last one, which was still way late in the big scheme of things, that I turned back to look at her and said "No you don't." She shut up a little.

Before my next bus trip, I'm going to use some of the hundreds of dollars I've saved over the years by taking the bus to buy an iPod. It is the only way. If I hadn't had David Foster Wallace's extravagantly entertaining Infinite Jest to distract me, I would have just sat there fantasizing about kicking someone's ass for five hours. At least I was able to make fun of it occasionally with my relatively sane seatmate, but still.

I should also note, for color's sake, that when we rolled up on Exit 7A on the NJ Turnpike, a guy near the front of the bus said "Hey, this is my exit!" The bus driver actually pulled over onto the snowy shoulder and let the guy (who apparently did not have any luggage stowed below the seating area) sprint 300 yards across various stretches of snow-covered pavement towards shelter. That was pretty funny, although the follow-up jokes by IPW and ESG (which, objectively, were also amusing) were not as well received.

Complaint: The trip took an additional three hours from Philadelphia, putting us in Port Authority at 12:50 am on Saturday, March 17. The bus was therefore 4 hours late, meaning that overall I arrived in New York 8 hours later than I should have. (Note that the bus I was supposed to have been on at 12:30 was scheduled to arrive in New York at 4:50 pm on March 16.)

I believe my fare for this trip should be refunded.

Interpolation: Also I think I should have called child services after all.

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