In Front of the Yellow Line

Bus Games

By Shawn Wells

If you’ve been following my blog, you understand how entertained I am by everyday life. It is definitely the grind of the job that forces me to do so. Not that it’s a tough job. On the contrary, it’s the easiest paycheque I’ve ever earned in my life. If you can go with the flow, you’ll be just fine. When traffic gets thick or weather unbearable, the mantra a bus driver needs to repeat is “I get paid by the hour.” However, once you know a route like the back of your hand or you’re working a slow time of day it is very easy to get lost in that more vicious of problems. Boredom.

The first problem is having no one to talk to. The social aspect of my job is a strange one. I don’t actually know a lot of the other drivers by name because I seldom get a chance to chat with them. Unless I’m willing to come into work early or stay late, the only time I get is layovers at transit centers. In fact, often I will have a passenger refer to another employee by name, whether it’s because it’s an old friend or their favorite driver from another route. They will ask if I know them and almost always the answer is no. But you also have to consider, in my city, there are over 1200 drivers and 4 different garages. Plus, knowing someone that works for the transit system, doesn’t guarantee that they are a bus driver. We staff a full time maintenance department (again out of 4 different locations), management, office staff, training department, inspectors, motormen (that’s the train drivers), disabled transport. A couple thousand employees in total. And I’m on a first name basis with about two dozen of them.

But Shawn, you say. Why not chat with passengers? I do, sure. I just usually don’t initiate the conversations. Superficial discussions about the weather or local sports teams are fine at first, but then you end up saying the same thing dozens of times a shift. I tend to wait until someone starts up a talk with me. Unfortunately, the people that start up conversations with a bus driver are usually people that you wouldn’t want to talk to in any other context. I remember one passenger I had once, I had pretty much tuned her out, answering with the occasional “Wow” or “Really?” or “I see”. From her end, it was repetitive and uninteresting and non-stop for 20 minutes. “You know what else driver?”  After overhearing this conversation, when she had gotten off, I had another person come up to me and say “Boy are you patient.” Really, I had no choice because I was stuck in a situation I couldn’t just excuse myself from. So instead I made a game out of it. I started counting the number of times she said “You know what else driver?”

This is the solution to the monotony of my job. I shut my brain off and get lost in my own thoughts. Not to scare you, I am still watching the road. Sometimes, the smallest things bring me amusement. Like the fare box game. This is the game where I try to collect as big of a pile as possible of coins and tickets without dumping it down. Several factors contribute to the challenge of this game. Looseness of the plate the coins land on. The number of coins versus tickets. The bumpiness of the road. Sure, not the most exciting game in the world, but when you’re bored at work, you’re playing “Ker-plunk”. And if anyone asks, I leave that pile there for kids that want to dump my fare box. But in my heart, I die a little when a kid does dump my fare, especially if I have a good pile going.

When you’re bored driving a bus, you notice small things. Like when your turn signal syncs up with the car in front of you. Or spotting a certain type of car all day. I had one early summer Saturday where I realized I had seen 9 different Corvettes, all different models or years. I’ve been known to challenge people to a drag race when at a redlight just for fun. I had one guy, in a suped up something or another, right hand steering, who I pulled up to at a light one day. My window was open and he looked at me and asked “Whatcha running in that thing?” We reved our engines and chatted for the minute we were stuck at the light. (He won the race, by the way) Next night, same intersection, I pull up next to the same guy who is in the middle of telling his girlfriend in the car the story of what happened there last night. He looks over mid sentence to say “...Oh my god! And that’s him!!” and busts out laughing. I informed him I wanted a rematch. (He won again)

Sometimes as I’m driving along, I will try to predict the exact moment my regular passengers will ring the bell with a snap of my fingers. This is similar to trying to predict which door someone will use or which seat they will sit in. Or as I pull up to a crowded stop, I will tear off the amount of transfers I think I’m going to need. Will I be right? Who is paying and who has a pass? And on occasion, what is that person’s excuse going to be to try and get a free ride? (You can usually see them coming a mile away)

There are days that you are forced to play a little game called “What’s that smell?” Often it will be something obvious like alcohol, marijuana or armpit. But sometimes it will be a food smell you’re trying to pinpoint like KFC or pizza (which is even more mysterious when you look in your mirror and don’t see anyone carrying a KFC bag or pizza box) And every once in a while you get a smell that you can only describe a garbage. Just straight up garbage smell. These are the days that I’m glad I carry scented hand sanitizer. Dab a little under my nose and I don’t have to smell the bad smells.

Occasionally, I will pass the time by figuring out what celebrities my passengers look like. It usually involves throwing an adjective in front like “Fat Bradley Cooper” or “White Will Smith”. Sometimes it’s a far stretch, sometimes it’s almost bang on. But it passes the time. Kind of like looking in my mirror and imagining people’s sex faces. This can sometimes send you down the rabbit hole and you regret playing this game.

But above all, being in a job where I spend my time solo simply gives me time to think. There are times that you really don’t want to know what is going on in there. Other times, I spend time thinking about a confrontation I had and what I should’ve said. We’ve all had this time to stew on something that upsets us, but with very little stimulus it seems worse to me. Most of my blogs have taken shape in my head for hours before I ever have a chance to write something down. In my spare time, I like to act in theatre so I will use this time to run lines in my head. Singing when my bus is empty. Speeches or emails have been written in my head. And as long as I don’t forget by the time I get to paper or computer, it works well.

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