More bus stories of despair

I do love a good blog, a chance to get things from my chest. If I took it all on board I would be six feet under by now. Sometimes it’s just frustrating and there is nobody to tell, nobody that will listen and even rarer is anybody that can help.

Take for instance another wonderful bus trip last night. The weather here is turning colder and at last a bit wetter, it’s getting into winter and that makes public transport all the more uncomfortable.

So I get out of work and go up the street, zipping my jacket up against the cold. A few minutes later my 220 turns up and I get on and after a few minutes it takes off. I really don’t know what timetable he’s running on but based on my last blog, that’s of no more concern.

We go through Footscray and like our normal run, pause at the ’220′ stop there and move on with a fresh load of passengers. A bit further up the road the drivers change outside the Library (strange, we don’t normally do driver swaps here). A bit further up again and we take a right turn, very strange, this is not the right direction, but nobody seems to care (other than me) and we go along a parallel road so I am not too unhappy.

At the end of this road I see an elderly couple talk to the driver, so I unplug my headphones and get in on the convo, I find out I we are going another way. So I say to the driver… ‘This is the 220′ and he says, no, 216 (actually a passenger butts in and contributes that part), so I repeated myself, ‘No, this was the 220 when I got it in the city, and it was the 220 when it stopped in Footscray’ and the elderly man agreed with me, yes it was the 220. It wasn’t just me going mad. So the bus driver summoned all of his customer management skills, shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘I dunno, I got on after that’. The polite passenger then informed me that where I wanted to go was 2km up the road in the other direction than the bus. ‘Yes, I know where I am going’, looking back at the driver, ‘do you know where you are going’? ‘and why your now kicking us off a bus in the rain’? I think I also added something about getting their act together as I got off.

So, not happy Jan, and a bit confused about getting on the right bus now, let alone what timetable it might be running to.