In front of the yellow line:

The Greatest Show on Earth

By Shawn Wells

Guy getting on my bus: Can you believe this is my first time riding a bus?

Me: Hey! Me too. Let’s make some memories.

It started with the occasional Facebook status update. Every time something funny happened on my bus, I would share it with my friends and family online and always received very positive feedback. “You should write these stories down for a book!” they would say. So, in these times what is the next best thing? Blog!

I guess I should start by saying who I am. My name is Shawn. I am a city bus driver. Some of my colleagues would be insulted by that term, insisting that I am referred to as ‘Transit Operator’. Potato, Potato. The fact remains, for a living, I drive a bus and I thoroughly enjoy what I do. I think something that helps with my love of the job, is that I’m also an avid people watcher. I’ve never been the type to be in the middle of a party, but rather a casual observer from the side lines. There is no better location to people watch than this . You experience one of the most diverse cross sections of society on a city bus. At any given time I could have business people getting home from work at the same time as homeless drunks trying to get to a shelter. Seniors heading to bingo. Stoned teenagers going to the mall.

Each bus tells a story and everyday I enjoy finding out what that story is. I can drive the exact same route at different times of the day and get a much different adventure. A route in the morning feels completely different than one at night, or on the weekend, or on the weekend at night. School special busses (which I dreaded at first) have a much different atmosphere in the morning than they do at the end of the school day. On the way there, all the kids are still tired and chat quietly. On the way home, they’re loud and all hyped up on sugar.

As I watch in my rear view mirror, the people are a constant vortex of activity. It’s fascinating to see, really. It’s like a beehive. I see people, obviously unhappy that their favorite seat is occupied, immediately take over that seat when it becomes vacated. On a full, rush hour bus I watch as people jockey for position to be near the doors when their stop comes. People moving aside from priority seating to allow someone in need to sit.

Some people just need to sit at the back. I see busses that have a dozen people on it, all strangers even, and they’ll all be crammed in that back third of the bus. That’s human nature. Every day I see the truth in the expression ‘creature of habit’. We very much are. People are thrown off their game so much by a backdoor on a bus that doesn’t open as fast as the average one. (By the way, pushing on them doesn’t make them open faster)

Some people need to sit at the front. Some people like to stand in the entranceway at the back door. One little old lady who was slow moving got on my bus, sat in the front seat. And each time I stopped she switched seats, moving one aisle back at a time. Finally, when her stop came, she exited out the back. This little old lady was concerned enough with the flow of traffic on the bus she wanted to make sure she didn’t exit in the front. But, she also knew she was slow and didn’t want to hold people up that way. What a great old lady. And then, on the other hand I’ve also had the people that insist on exiting out the front. I once saw a group of University students come from the very back seat, down the stairs, all the way down the aisle, just so they could exit out the front (holding up people trying to get on.)

It’s funny how many times I’ve also seen someone exit out the front at the same time as someone exiting back, and once they’re out on the sidewalk they pass each other on the sidewalk because they’re going the opposite direction of where they exited. Make sense? The person exiting the back door heads towards the front of the bus and vice versa. It’s a strange phenomenon. Why wouldn’t you exit from the front if you were heading further forward? Creature of habit. Human nature.

I’ve been on a bus, filled with tired looking people after a long day work, everyone silent staring straight ahead. I was driving into the sunset, when someone pulled out a harmonica and started playing a mournful tune. It very much felt like a movie showing an Old West type trail ride, or a prison bus. It was beautiful and surreal all at the same time. And I have the best seat on the bus to watch it all from.

From in front of the yellow line, that’s how I see it.