Let em know

Reading the mX yesterday, the cover story was rather interesting as I'm a regular bus user to commute from place to place. The main gist of the article was that the transport minister John Mickel had made comments regarding bus drivers; accusing them of overcharging passengers. Needless to say, when you make a claim you need evidence to support it and Mickel's was wrongly founded. Firstly he said that drivers were changing times on the clocks used by the go card readers, then he said that the problem came from dodge machines as opposed to cheating bus drivers (though, I don't blame him on the latter) and admitted that his message was muddled.

Turns out that bus drivers can't even change the clocks on the go card machines anyway, so whose fault is it? As a result of this, several bus drivers have decided to go on strike by not accepting fares and are wanting Mickel to resign from his post. Funny thing is, the article also mentioned that go card readers are faulty currently. Thanks for supporting one of my previous blogs lol.

So what can we learn from his mistakes? Firstly, accusations can cause relationships (whether they be friendships, professional, romantic etc.) to go sour and when the two parties involved are reliant on one another on such a large scale, all hell breaks loose eventually affecting other parties as well. Secondly, making accusations without first thinking about what you're trying to say and without proof or evidence makes EVERYTHING worse. DON'T DO IT!

Busses

As many people that rely on the busses often to commute from place to place then they would understand what it's like to have interesting rides and enjoy being a user of the bus. Though, often there are times when you wish that you didn't rely on the bus and had your own form of transport. This love/hate relationship is rather idiotic as the pros of taking a bus don't outweigh the cons a lot.

That may be due to a number of reasons such as the bus being delayed for far too long because the fucking driver probably thought that it wasn't any of his/her business to go past the stop on time and stopped to have a fag. There are also instances of when people get on the bus and take their time to pay for their fare with enough shrapnel to make a metal detector believe it has discovered a treasure chest.

Here's another great reason: Old people that believe they own the bus and expect you to vacate the seat for "disabled" people, BCC OBVIOUSLY weren't thinking because that seat is actually quite hard to get onto if you're old. One person was even idiotic enough to try to convince me by saying that they had arthritis in their knees; seriously, why would you want to get up onto those high seats if it hurts like hell to apply pressure to your joints? Oh well, I looked back and pointed out that there was at least 5/6 spots left to sit down. Pwned.

So onto the good points: The good points of taking a bus, well they're rather trivial and not that great to be honest. For instance, today I saw a mattress in the middle of the highway, needless to say it was a big wtf moment for me. Seeing random thongs on the highway is also good for a laugh, but the highlight was probably a billboard for a Sprite advertisement that read "If emos are so non-conformist, why do they all look the same?" hahaha, fucking win.

Idiots

On the bus today I sat next to a girl that was a bit of a dipshit. While I was doing my sudoku she waved at me rather timidly so I took my time to notice her. Upon taking off my earphones she asked me where the South Bank stop was, believing it to be after the Buranda stop? To which I told her that it's actually after Mater Hill". Her reaction was rather priceless and hilarious at the same time as she responded with "uhhhhhh.... uhmmmm.... is..... where's that?", with me saying "it's the one after Buranda" and her replying "oh... ok...". What really surprised me afterwards was her anxiety as she started to rustle her bag a lot and looked from side to side as if she had just been resurrected with a "wtf?!" demeanor. Once we had got to Mater Hill (the stop after Buranda) she got up and approached one of the bus drivers (there was more than one) and asked him a question. I instantly laughed and shook my head in disbelief as he pointed in the direction of the tunnel, mouthing "it's the next stop".

For crying out loud, if you're gonna ask a person a question in confidence and not take their advice then why ask in the first place? She's lucky that the bus driver was nice otherwise she would've ended up at the wrong stop.