Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Is it cold in here, or is it just me?

Fuzzy rides my bus. (He has short hair except for the big bald spot. His hair looks really soft. Petably soft. But it would be wrong to pet someone on the bus. It would be especially wrong to pet the blind guy on the bus. But I digress.) (Ahem.) He's a nice guy. He's blind. He wears a tan maintenance uniform, so he's presumably in the maintenance arts and sciences. He lives a couple of apartment buildings down from me. I think he knows Mr. Smith. Today, we had a new bus driver. He was new in the sense that not only has he not been driving the TTA bus long, but I'm not sure he's driven the 105 before. This new guy rolls up to where Fuzzy is, stops, opens the doors and sits there. If you saw a guy with one of those white canes with the red bottom, wouldn't you think, "hey, maybe that guy can't see very well?" Nope, not this guy. He sits there. Fuzzy has to ask what bus it is then nearly trips because he doesn't know this is an old bus with three steps up rather than a new bus with only one step. Fuzzy then goes to sit down in a seat occupied by a woman. She just sits there. She doesn't move or speak. Seriously, is she going to let him sit in her lap? The bus driver also remains mute. I speak up and say "the seat behind the driver is empty." Fuzzy recognizes my voice and we start chatting about how our days were. Nice guy, that Fuzzy. The bus driver and that woman? Not so much.

I'm still on the same bus when we roll on up to the District Drive Park and Ride. We stop and a woman runs over. "I'm sorry, but I just have a quick question. I left my phone on the other bus. What should I do?" To which the driver responds, "Well, I don't know, the bus is already gone." Surely he's kidding. He then says he can call the dispatcher, which he does. The dispatcher calls back and tells him to tell her to go to the lost and found. The driver asks the dispatcher if she can alert the other driver to this AWOL phone. The dispatchers response? "That's a negative, sir."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Poor Fuzzy - and poor lady with the phone... You'd think that they would try to be a bit more helpful!!

Meg said...

You would think. The problem is that not helping gets them the same paycheck as helping, so why bother?

FoxyMoron said...

I hope they didn't get any of your cookies!