Thursday, March 19, 2009

Skip bus driver

For this post, I want to focus solely on my regular bus driver. As I don't know his name, I will refer to him as Joe. Because let's face it, the likelihood that his name is Joe is very high.
Joe is a fairly new RTD employee and he takes his job extremely seriously.
I am going to describe a typical bus ride with Joe from beginning to end:

I wait at the bus stop a few feet away from the curb, as to not get run over or splashed by the pools of water by the sidewalk. Joe pulls up in the Skip and opens the doors. I look up and he is waving me in. "Come on, come on". This makes me feel like I'm wasting his time and I get flustered and run up the stairs into the bus. I sit down and he announces over the bus' PA system "Heeeere we goooo!" And we pull away. This makes me feel like we're on a ride or a fun tour bus, so this makes up for the earlier incident.
Before every single stop, Joe pulls down his microphone and says either "For this stop, exit out the back door folks, back door at this stop thank you" or "Either door works for this stop folks, either door at this stop thank you". I appreciate this because I don't like when people exit out the front door when there are people waiting at the stop to get on. So when the driver sees that there are people waiting or no people waiting, he can direct his passengers accordingly.
As you may have noticed, Joe is a little bipolar. You may like him at first, but then he gets mean. For example, I was on the bus yesterday and someone had accidentally pulled the "stop request" cable a stop too early. Joe stopped and there were other passengers getting on anyway, so it wasn't a big deal. He opened the back door because the "stop request" light was on, and the person who had accidentally pulled it yelled "Sorry, I'm getting off at the next stop" and Joe looked in the rear view mirror, gave him a dirty look and yelled back "Good for you!" and continued to glare at the poor sap. When the bus arrived at the next stop, our hapless friend mumbled "thanks" and rushed off the bus to escape Joe's burning stare.
I've noticed that Joe is like an old abused dog. The more he becomes familiar with you, the friendlier he gets. He still hurries me onto the bus, but he always smiles at me in the rear view mirror when I get off the bus and yells "Have a great day!"

1 comment:

A l y s s a said...

Do you think it's a higher probability that bus drivers in general are named Joe?

Also, I think being a bus driver must be a really lonely job. Either too much consistency or not enough. But perhaps that's just because I've never done it. Seems to me Joe is in some weird place in his life where he doesn't know whether to rush people in or force people out. You call it bi-polar, I call it a cry for help.

Thanks for posting!! Yar!